


The Faircourt Agency

by Avatar_Stark



Category: HFY - Fandom, Humanity Fuck Yeah - Fandom, Original Work
Genre: Centaurs, Cryptids, Demihumans Live Hidden Among Us, Dwarves, Elves, F/M, Fairies, Ghosts, Gnomes, Human/Monster Romance, Lovecraftian, Magic and Science, Mermaids, Monster Girls, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Paranormal, Urban Fantasy, Vampires
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:26:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 34,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25775101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Avatar_Stark/pseuds/Avatar_Stark
Summary: Rick Carter and Gus Weisz are a couple of NYU grad students who occasionally do paranormal research on the side. When they discover that ghosts, fairies, demihumans, and other mythical beings are real, they're recruited by the mysterious head of the Faircourt Agency, a secretive organization dedicated to fighting evil, solving supernatural mysteries, and protecting the hidden world of the Fair Folk. As it turns out, fairies are just plain miserable at computers, and even worse at science. So when things start getting downright Lovecraftian, it's going to take a couple of rookie human agents to save the day!
Comments: 8
Kudos: 6





	1. The Mystery of MacKenzie Manor

Gus gave the steering wheel a sharp tug and deftly parallel-parked his boxy van, so that now it sat across the street from the spooky old Victorian three-storey house. He switched off the lights and cut the engines and then leaned back in the driver's seat to mull over the plan one last time. It was nearly two o'clock in the morning, a moonless night and eerily still, but for the occasional flicker of a street-lamp with faulty wiring.

Granted, they were in Astoria, Queens, so it was bound to be eerie anyway. But the lateness of the hour and the desertedness of the narrow street only multiplied the effect.

Rick sat in the passenger seat next to Gus, also contemplating the creepy-ass Scooby-Doo house that loomed over on the other side of the street. He turned and looked at his friend, still able to make out details despite the gloom. Gus was short, wire-thin, and wore plastic-framed glasses that looked too big for his face. Slacks with a white oxford shirt, a narrow necktie, and a pocket protector completed his geek-chic ensemble. Rick just rolled his eyes and snorted a laugh. It was two in the morning! What the fuck were they doing here?

Gus pulled the keys out of the ignition and glanced at Rick. "What?"

Rick, at least, was dressed for the kind of work he'd be doing: boots, blue-jeans, and a khaki vest with full pockets over a flannel shirt. He was a little older than Gus and noticeably more fit, sporting a mane of dark hair that hung messily over his face. Rick shook his head and said, "I can't for the life of me figure out why I let you drag me along like this. We're not going to find anything."

Gus put his hand over his heart, opened his mouth, and feigned an expression of hurt. "How could you say that? Come on, buddy; don't be such a downer! We're this close to a big score—I can feel it!"

"That's what you said the last three times," retorted Rick. "I swear to God, if the university catches wind that I'm involved in this, I'm never helping you out again."

"Pfft. So what if the board finds out? You're just assisting a serious researcher with a perfectly legitimate scientific experiment."

"No... I've been suckered into building and operating all the tech for my loony friend, the paranormal researcher, on all his loony investigations!" Rick pointed a finger at Gus's chest and emphasized, "This cannot get back to the school—especially not the engineering faculty. It could mean my grant! And besides, it just isn't respectable."

"You know, it really cuts me when you say things like that," muttered Gus. "I'd expect it from some stiff professor with a beard and a bowtie, but from my best friend?"

Rick looked down at his lap, but said nothing.

Gus smiled and elbowed his friend in the arm. "Come on! What if we pull this off? Then we're big time!"

"Yeah," scoffed Rick. "Like a cable TV show about ghost-chasing or something. Real big."

The sarcasm was lost on Gus. "Yeah! How awesome would that be? I can see it now: 'Weisz and Carter, Paranormal Researchers!' Oh yeah, buddy, we're gonna be a hit!"

Once again, Rick fell silent. He opened the door on his side and leapt down out of the van.

Gus looked after him. "Rick? Are you gonna help me get your gizmos out of the back? Ricky?"

* * *

Two shadowy figures crept across the street, one of them wheeling a pallet on a dolly piled high with electronic gadgets. It took both of them to boost the dolly up over the curb and onto the sidewalk in front of the old house.

"It's no good from out here," said Gus. "We'll have to head inside if we want a decent reading."

"All right, I'll bite. What's so special about this place anyway?" Rick looked up at the gloomy manor and added, "It looks like the sort of place you'd take to murder somebody."

"Whoa, let's hope so!" said Gus, grinning wide. "Murder scenes are always hot with residual psychic vibrations!"

Rick shot Gus a look that quickly withered the smaller man's spirits.

"Uh... anyway, yeah, take a look at this." Reaching into a bag, Gus pulled out a flashlight and a folded-up stack of old newspapers. He unfolded the top paper and spread it out over Rick's pile of gear. As Gus shined the light on the front page, Rick could make out that one of the faded old headlines was touting the existence of a haunted house in New York. "This here is MacKenzie Manor," said Gus. "Every last plank and nail was brought over to the States from Scotland before they rebuilt the place from the foundation up. And it's a total hotspot for hauntings and paranormal activity—it's, like, the neighborhood nexus, man!"

"Fantastic," Rick deadpanned. "I'm thrilled."

"Your enthusiasm is truly inspiring," said Gus, who even now failed to suppress an ear-to-ear smile. "Come on, this'll be a cakewalk. We go in, sweep for EM and thermals, full-spectrum scan, maybe poke around a little for the usual signs of activity. Easy and fun."

"Yep, this is exactly how I wanted to be spending my Saturday nights." muttered Rick. "So. How are we getting inside? I am _not_ helping you break-and-enter again; not since the steam-tunnel incident."

"That was _not_ my fault," said Gus.

"Was too," countered Rick.

"Agree to disagree," said Gus. "Anyway, we don't need your lockpicks this time. We have permission." He fished a key out of his pocket and touched it to his nose.

"Is that a key to the front door?"

Gus nodded. "Mm-hm."

"Where did you get a key to the front door?"

"From the caretaker," said Gus matter-of-factly. "Apparently, whoever owns this place wants to figure out what's going bump in the night here before they open it up to tours again."

Rick was skeptical. "Okay. But why call _you_?"

Gus's jaw dropped. "Maybe because I'm the most respected parapsychologist in the tri-state area? Did that ever occur to you?"

Rick leaned on his stacked-up equipment and folded his arms. "Can't be that. You don't even have your doctorate yet."

"Neither do you!"

"So? I'm an engineer. That's way harder than whatever spooky-ass, Egon-Spengler-wannabe bullshit it is you do."

"I will pretend that I didn't hear that," said Gus as he ascended the creaky, dusty front steps of the old house. He fit the key into the lock, fiddled with the knob until the front door flew open, and indicated the darkness beyond with the beam of his flashlight. "After you," he said, pointing to the interior of the allegedly haunted house.

Rick sighed. "Whatever. Just help me with the gear."

* * *

Gus grunted as he and Rick set down the last of the heavy equipment-cases. Then Gus took up his flashlight again, while Rick fished an even bigger and boxier floodlight out from his equipment-pile; and together they shined the beams around the old manor's foyer. Everything about the place screamed "classic haunted house." There were cobwebs everywhere, especially on the huge chandelier dangling from the middle of the ceiling. A thick layer of dust underfoot dulled the marbled black-and-white tile flooring. White sheets covered nearly all the furniture. A grand double-staircase swept its way up to the second floor; and there were _lots_ of doors leading to other rooms, the brass knobs all tarnished black with age.

"Whoa-ho-ho, this is _great_!" exclaimed Gus. "Are you getting a vibe from this place? Because I'm totally getting a vibe."

"No," said Rick. "No vibe. Only—only— _ah_ —* _achoo!_ *—allergies."

Gus shined his light in Rick's face. "It's just dust, buddy."

Rick flinched away from the light in his eyes. "Whatever. You just—you always get your hopes up, and you're _always_ disappointed. It gets old."

"Just you wait," said Gus. "It's going to happen tonight! We'll see a _real_ spectral manifestation, or find _actual_ ectoplasmic residue, or—or at least hear some auditory phenomena!"

Rick sneered. "Seriously? What, you think one of these bedsheets is gonna float up into the air and start booing and moaning and rattling chains!?"

As Rick spoke, a spooky chill suddenly ran down both men's spines. Was it getting cold in here? Rick stopped talking, and he and Gus both at the same time shined their flashlights on the nearest piece of cloth-covered furniture.

Nothing happened.

Rick sighed and wiped a hand across his face. "Christ on a cracker, now you've got _me_ doing it."

Gus pointed his flashlight at Rick's face again. "Doing what?"

"Gah, _stop_ that! I mean, you've got me all worked up and imagining things!"

Gus's eyes lit up and he grinned wide. "You mean _you_ felt that too?"

Rick folded his arms. "What about it?"

"We both just experienced an autonomous, precognitive, somatic response to the presence in this house! That—is— _awesome_!"

Rick opened his mouth to say something snarky, but Gus stopped him with a raised finger and a shush. "Hold on. Just—be quiet and listen for a sec, okay?"

Rick rolled his eyes and played along.

Silence fell between the two investigators, and now the house was quiet. Too quiet. Eerily quiet. Even at this hour, there should have been street-noise, traffic in the distance, maybe even a siren. They were in New York, after all! The "city that never sleeps!" But there was nothing; minutes ticked by, and all was still—

Until Rick's cell phone rang. Both men jumped.

"Argh! What the hell, Rick!?" Gus was breathing heavily, trying to calm his beating heart.

Rick took his phone from his pocket and glanced at the caller-ID. "Huh. It's Tracey."

"Tracey!? What's your fiancée doing calling you at 2 AM!?"

"She's out in L.A. all month, remember? It's only 11 there."

"Still inconsiderate," muttered Gus under his breath.

Rick, meanwhile, answered his phone, only to be disappointed by the sound of static and garbled, broken bits of voice. "Tracey? Hey, you're—hello? Sorry, I can't hear you, Trace. What's—are you there? ... Can you hear me? Tracey? ... Damn it, it dropped the call."

"Bad reception?" asked Gus.

"Guess so," said Rick. He peered at the phone's display. "Wait a minute. It says I've got full bars in here. That's weird."

"You gonna try calling her back?"

Rick shrugged. "Could be an emergency."

"Oh, come on. She can text if it's important; right?"

"Like I'd take advice from you," said Rick, touching his phone's callback icon. "You've never even had a girlfriend."

"Have too," said Gus. "Remember Heather Simons?"

Try as he might, Rick couldn't make an outgoing call: every time he tried to redial Tracey, he was rewarded with an angry beep and dead air instead of ringing. "Gus, we were in the seventh grade."

"So?"

"So, Heather dumped your ass after only two days, because, and I quote, 'only dorks have as many Power Ranger dolls as you do.'"

"Action figures," corrected Gus. "And it still counts."

* * *

While Rick busied himself opening his equipment-cases and setting up the gear, Gus searched along the walls of the room until he found what he was looking for: it was one of those old-timey pushbutton light-switches. He punched it; the chandelier flooded the foyer with muted yellow light.

Rick blinked away the momentary blindness and glared at Gus. "Warn me before you do that, huh?"

"Sorry," mumbled Gus.

Rick had several tripods standing around the room by now; to each, he'd affixed a different scope or sensor. Once his laptop finished booting, he ran cables from each of these to USB ports and started calibrating everything in the software.

Gus was getting impatient. "Gadgets all ready to go?"

"In a minute."

Gus huffed. Looking for something to do, he started opening doors and checking out the rest of the house. Parlor; study; kitchen; stairs down to the basement (those looked extra creepy— _Sweet,_ thought Gus); dining room; sitting-room. And that was all just on the ground floor.

"Okay," said Rick. "All done. Now let's get this over with."

"Great! Talk to me, buddy," said Gus, walking over to stand behind Rick and look at the laptop-screen. "What've we got? Thermals?"

"That's a negative," said Rick. "Not a cold-spot in sight."

"Damn. What about EM? Any anomalous currents or fields?"

Rick tapped a few keys and switched programs. "Doubt it. There's never—hold the phone." He rubbed his eyes and double-checked the display. "Magnetics just spiked up to half a tesla!"

Gus gaped. "—Did you say tesla? Not gauss!?"

"See for yourself!" said Rick, showing the display to Gus.

Gus leaned over Rick's shoulder and confirmed the reading. "Holy shit! How come your computer's not fried?"

"No clue," said Rick. "But I'm not taking any chances." He started shutting down the laptop and unplugging all the peripherals.

While that was going on, Gus noticed something else. "Hey, Rick," he said, rolling up his sleeve and holding out his arm. "Check this out!"

Rick looked up and saw that every hair on Gus's skin was standing up, as if he were touching a Van de Graaff generator. The hair on his head was starting to spike up too.

Gus was positively giddy. "Isn't this freaking cool!?"

"More like freaking dangerous!" snapped Rick, whose own hair had suddenly risen into a foot-long halo around his head. "Flux densities like this can turn metal stuff into bullets!"

Then, all of the sudden, it stopped—Rick and Gus's hair fell back into place, and at the same time, a loud **_thump_** issued from somewhere above them, causing the ceiling to shake and dust to fall from the chandelier.

They both looked up and stared at the ceiling.

Rick swallowed. "Does the, uh—does the caretaker live on the premises? Or the owner, maybe?"

Gus slowly shook his head. "Nope."

"Someone else in the house?" suggested Rick.

"That _would_ be the rational explanation." If Gus was trying to hide his excitement, he was doing a miserably poor job of it. "Wanna go check out the literal bump-in-the-night?"

"Guess that's why we're here," said Rick.

Together, they faced the stairs. Then, Gus leading and Rick following, they went up.

* * *

The stairs creaked underfoot as Gus and Rick climbed up to the second floor. The chandelier only illuminated part of the hallway up here; they turned their flashlights back on and ran the beams up and down the corridor both ways. There were no more light-switches up here; but plenty more doors.

Gus pointed his light down the left-hand hall. "Split up? I go this way, you go that way?"

"I'd really rather not," said Rick.

"Suit yourself," said Gus. With his free hand, he took out his own cell-phone and started recording video.

"Seriously?" said Rick.

"Gotta be ready in case we see something," reasoned Gus. "Heck, even if we don't, this'll be great content for my podcast!"

Rick groaned. "You've got a—? No, wait, never mind. I don't want to know."

"Number two paranormal program on the internet!" said Gus proudly. "It's called _The_ —"

"—I don't care," said Rick.

"Sure you do," said Gus, pointing his camera at Rick and getting a close-up of his friend's face. "Come on, smile for the peoples. Eh? Ricky, you wanna be in the show?"

"No, I don't want to be in the show. And if this winds up on YouTube, you're gonna have some 'splaining to do."

Gus put the phone down. "Spoilsport."

"Nerd," muttered Rick.

"Meathead," countered Gus.

 _"Fleshbag,"_ whispered a hoarse and tinny voice.

Rick started. "Who said that?"

But Gus was already heading down the left-hand corridor. He stopped, turned around, and shot Rick a funny look. "Who said what?"

Rick stared at his confused friend. "You didn't...? Ugh, never mind. Let's just get this over with, so we can get out of here."

Together they made their way down to the end of hall to examine the first door. "You're acting kinda weird tonight, bro," commented Gus.

* * *

The door at the end of the hall opened up into a conservatory or sunroom, with wide bay-windows (caked solid gray with dust), stone pots and clay planters positively everywhere, and the blackened and decayed remains of lots and lots of dead plants. The musty stench in this room was more than a little overpowering, so they gave this one a pass and moved on.

Making their way back down the hall, they found that the next door opened up into a modestly-sized library. Rick's spirits brightened considerably upon seeing this chamber: he was an incorrigible bibliophile. "Check it out," he said, darting inside and pulling a random volume off a shelf. He wiped the dust off the spine and held it up close to his flashlight. "Robert Burns. Nice. Whoever lived here had taste."

Gus, meanwhile, shined his own beam around the room and sighed. "Nothing here. Let's go."

Rick was tempted to stick around and browse the stacks for a bit, but decided against it. He put the book back on the shelf. "All right."

They went back out into the corridor. The next door was a set of stairs going up to the third floor. They passed these by for the time being and headed down the right-hand hallway. They found a couple of empty linen-closets and a wash-room; nothing interesting there. The door after that opened up into a music-room, although the only indications of this were two empty sheet-music stands (both rather old and ornate) and an upright piano covered by a drape of cloth.

"Hey—cool!" said Gus. He went in, gripped the cloth with both hands, and yanked it free. Once the dust cleared—and Gus stopped coughing—he examined the piano. Above the keyboard, the instrument had an open spool-box with a music-roll set into it: a player piano.

"Are you sure you should be messing with that?" asked Rick.

"I'm just gonna take a look," said Gus. He gave some of the keys a few experimental taps. "Hm. It's out of tune."

A few seconds later, the pianola came to life. The spool started turning, and now the instrument was belting out a horribly discordant parody of an old ragtime melody.

Gus and Rick stared blankly at the player piano for several seconds, until Rick said to Gus, "Please turn it off."

Gus tried hitting the keys again; he tried depressing each of the foot-pedals in turn. But still the music (such as it was) played on. He turned to Rick and shrugged. "I don't know how it works."

After another awkward moment, they both left the room and shut the door tightly behind them to drown out the obnoxious sound.

* * *

The last room at the other end of the hall was a spare room that was being used to store a seemingly random collection of old furniture, junk, and knickknacks. There were sheet-covered couches; stacked dining-chairs; a pile of empty picture-frames; antique vases and lamps; and more. Rick found a light-switch in this room and tried it: it worked.

Annoyingly, they could still hear the off-key ragtime through the wall, muffled though it was.

"Doesn't look like there's anything in here either," said Rick.

"Guess not," said Gus. He went inside to poke around anyway. "Hey, look at this!" Gus was pointing at one of those old-timey candlestick telephones, which stood on a small end-table and was still plugged into the wall. "Just like the one from _The Addams Family_!" He set down his flashlight and his cell-phone, picked up the mouthpiece and the earpiece, and joked, "Hello, operator?"

"Quit clowning around, would you?" said Rick.

Gus put the phone back. "Line's dead anyway." He picked up his stuff again and followed Rick back out into the hallway. "That just leaves the stairs."

Rick pointed his flashlight and let Gus walk past him. "Lead the way."

* * *

The third storey was less interesting than the second. There were only bedrooms up here, none of which showed any sign of being occupied; and another set of stairs, cramped and cobwebbed, leading all the way up to the attic.

"Hey, Rick," said Gus, "I'm gonna go snoop around in the master bedroom. You check out the attic, okay?"

"Fine." While Gus disappeared into the largest of the third-floor bedrooms, Rick ascended the attic-stairs. The boards were dry-rotted and extra creaky. Rick picked his way carefully, half expecting his foot to break cleanly through one of the steps at any moment. Thankfully, that didn't happen.

At the top was a door coated in dark lacquer, with a crystalline knob and a skeleton-key still sitting in the keyhole. Rick tested the knob; locked. He tried the key. It was a little rusty, but after giving it some force, the key turned with a "click." He pushed open the door and shined his flashlight inside.

The attic was pristine. There wasn't a speck of dust or a single spider-web to be found. What did occupy the room were dolls: rows and rows of carefully-positioned, neatly-posed dolls. Baby dolls and ragdolls on chairs, fashion-dolls and porcelain dolls on shelves, marionettes and poppets hanging on the walls. And the eyes of every single doll—whether said eyes were glass and glinting in the cone of Rick's flashlight, sewn buttons, or merely painted on—were facing the entryway.

Rick uttered one word—"Nope."—and shut the attic-door again.

* * *

Gus was pouting (and no longer bothering to record any video) as they made their way back down to the ground floor and the foyer.

"I told you we wouldn't find anything," said Rick. "What do I always tell you? We _never_ find _anything_."

Gus was too sullen to reply.

At least, that was the case right up until they got downstairs again. There, they found that all of Rick's detection-equipment had been packed away back in each piece's proper box or crate, and that said boxes were all neatly stacked by the front door.

Rick gaped. "Uh... who touched my stuff!?"

Gus responded with a high-pitched "squee" that would have put a teenaged girl at a boy-band concert to shame. His hands were balled into fists and clutched tightly to his chest; his whole body shook with excitement. "...Poltergeist!" he exclaimed at last. "POLTERGEIST!"

"Okay," said Rick, mostly to himself. "Okay. Just—stay calm here. Don't freak out." He felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach and mopped the cold sweat off his brow with his sleeve. He turned to Gus (who had a toothy, ear-to-ear grin plastered on his face) and said, "Gus. Please tell me that _you_ moved all my stuff."

Gus calmed down just enough to shake his head. "Wasn't me."

"Then, who the fu—?" Rick's question was interrupted by a sound coming from the ground-floor study, halfway between a buzz and a ring, repeating every few seconds. Rick and Gus looked at each other and then followed the noise.

Inside the study, hanging on the wall above a roll-top desk, there sat an old-fashioned wall-box phone. It was ringing.

"I—I thought you said the lines were dead," said Rick.

"Maybe it was just the phone upstairs that didn't work," said Gus.

They both stared at the telephone for a bit, until Rick asked, "Aren't you gonna get it?"

"Um—yeah, sure," said Gus. He swallowed; went into the room; and answered the phone. "Hello?"

Rick watched as the color drained away from his friend's face. Now white as a sheet, Gus turned, faced Rick, and held out the earpiece. "He—he says it's for you."

"Who says?"

Gus didn't answer.

Rick grumbled something impolite, crossed the room, and took the earpiece from Gus. Gus was still standing there stupefied, so Rick gently nudged him out of the way and spoke into the receiver on the wall-box. "Hello?"

The answer came as a mix of garbled static and snippets of a woman's voice—his fiancée's voice. _"Rick—...—help me!—...—Rick!"_

"Tracey? Tracey!?" Rick shouted.

The line went dead.

Rick whirled around and prodded Gus in the chest with one finger. "This—this isn't cool, man! This is _not_ funny!"

Gus stared blankly and said nothing. Another shove from Rick finally roused him from his stunned stupor. "Wh—what are you talking about, Ricky?"

Rick slammed the earpiece down on the phone's hook and said, "I'm talkin' about Tracey! How did you put her up to this? What kinda sick prank—"

"This isn't a prank!" said Gus. "I'm telling you, it's the house! The presence!"

"Don't give me that ghost-story _bullshit_ —!"

_**KA-THUMP.** _

Rick and Gus looked down. They had both _felt_ that—underneath them. It had been enough of a bang to rattle the floorboards.

Gus had to fight to keep his voice from quavering. "W-w-we still haven't looked in the b-basement."

"Guess not," said Rick. "...Well, come on, then. Someone is in this house and fucking with us. I want to know who."

"...Or what," said Gus.

Rick held up one finger in Gus's face. "Not. Right. Now."

Gus nodded slowly and followed Rick out of the study.

* * *

They stood together before the open basement door, shining their lights down the aged and rotting stairs. The pungent scent of mildew was evident even from here. The way down was positively choked with cobwebs and dust-bunnies.

"Probably bugs down there," said Gus, suppressing a shudder. "I _hate_ bugs. You'd better go first."

Rick glanced sidelong at his friend. "Why don't _you_ go first?"

Gus held up a fist. "Best two out of three?"

Rick mirrored the gesture. "You're on."

Two quick rounds of rock–paper–scissors later, Rick was mumbling obscenities under his breath and testing the first step. _Creeeeak._ "—How has this place not been condemned yet?"

"H-historical Society?" suggested Gus.

Rick took point, and Gus followed him down. At the bottom of the stairs, they found a small cellar, concrete-floored and sparsely-furnished: just a workbench with some tools, a ladder, and a few old paint-cans stacked into a pile. By all accounts, it would have been a perfectly ordinary basement to an old house like this—except for the fact that there was a gaping hole in one wall, big enough for a man to step through, bricks and rubble scattered loosely on the floor around it.

Gus pointed his flashlight at the hole. "What do you s'pose is back there?"

"The Cask of Amontillado," said Rick dryly.

"...The what?"

"Philistine."

They approached the gap in the wall together and shined their lights through it. The chamber on the other side wasn't merely unfinished; it looked freshly-dug. Dirt walls, dirt floor; and delved into the loose and loamy soil were no fewer than a dozen pits. Disturbingly rectangular pits.

Gus swallowed audibly. "...Graves."

The moment he spoke, a sudden gust of wind blew across the dirt-chamber and out of the hole, buffeting Gus and Rick in their faces. At the same time, with a soft _fwish_ , a little green flame no bigger than a candlelight appeared above one of the graves. And then another lit up, and another, and another, until each of the dozen open graves had a little will-o'-the-wisp of witch-light hovering above it.

"G-g-glowing graves," said Rick.

And that was when the spectres began to materialize. The green candle-flames left the graves and made for the hole, seemingly carried by invisible bodies that were marching towards Gus and Rick. Trails of green smoke fell from the wisps of flame, first taking the shape of candles and lanterns that hovered along with their lights; then the bony hands _holding_ the candles and lanterns; and finally, the bodies wrapped in tattered death-shrouds and hooded, skeletal faces.

A low, croaking voice came from somewhere behind the two investigators: _"Dance with us now... come... and dance_ la danse macabre _!"_

The off-key pianola ragtime drifted down from somewhere upstairs. The spectres floated in waltzing circles around Rick and Gus, twirling in time, beckoning with bony hands. The disembodied voice chortled and guffawed.

The two humans, rooted in place by abject terror, screamed their lungs out.

And just like that, instantaneously, it stopped. The spectres vanished; the flickering green flames winked out; the ghostly laughter and the player-piano music both died down to nothing; and even the hole in the wall leading to the dirt-chamber with the graves simply vanished. The wall was solid; there was no longer any debris on the floor. It was as if that part of the basement had never existed.

Gus and Rick kept screaming until their voices ran hoarse. Then they stood there in the basement, hyperventilating, trying desperately to regather their wits.

It took some time. The phenomena they'd just witnessed was _undeniably_ paranormal—and borderline brain-breaking, especially for Rick.

So it was little wonder that Gus recovered first. " _Now_ do you believe me!?

"Yeah," said Rick, still breathing hard. "I believe you."

While Rick was freaking out, Gus was geeking out. "Full-torso apparitions! Auditory manifestations!" He rested a hand on the basement wall where the hole had been moments earlier. "Poltergeisting _and_ total environmental manipulation! Rick, this entity can _alter solid matter_ —maybe even bend reality!"

Rick swallowed down his growing dread, lest it become a full-on panic-attack. The things Gus was describing—they were real. Dangerously, terrifyingly real. And right now, in light of this awful new information, he could only think of one question to ask. "...So how do we _kill_ it?"

Gus looked at Rick as if he'd just said the dumbest thing possible. "You can't kill what's already dead, Rick."

Rick shook his head. "I know that! I mean—how do we _stop_ it? Get rid of it?"

Gus shrugged. "Exorcism, maybe?"

"Okay; we can work with that!" Rick started to pace around the cellar as he ranted, "First we get the fuck out of here. Then we go find a church. We get some priests, we come back here—"

"Rick—"

"Hell, we get ministers, rabbis, the fucking Ghostbusters, that douchebag with the TV show—"

"Rick!"

"Gus! _We. Need. Experts!_ "

"Rick, look at me." Gus stopped Rick in his tracks by placing both hands on his shoulders and giving him a gentle shake. "Listen. _We're_ the experts. It's just you and me, buddy. And we can't get rid of it, not yet. We have to _study_ it!"

Rick took Gus by the arms and started dragging him bodily up the stairs. "No; we have to leave. Before it _murders_ us."

"Aw, but—but—but—it's the discovery of a lifetime!" sputtered Gus. "It'll make our careers! We'll be big-time! World-famous!"

They came to the top of the stairs. Rick pushed Gus through the door and out into the foyer. "I'd rather be obscure and alive than famous and d—!" Rick's voice caught in his throat. He and Gus both froze in their tracks and paled at what they saw.

In the middle of the entry-hall there stood a gaunt and ghoulish figure, pallid skin hanging off its bones, empty eye-sockets and a drooping jaw filled only with the blackest shadow... and worst of all, it was wearing _clown makeup_. In one hand it held a bicycle horn; in the other, a meat-cleaver. It was motionless; and it was facing Rick and Gus, staring at them with a vaguely anguished expression on its disturbing facsimile of a face.

"NOPE," said Rick. "Nope nope nope nope nope." He took Gus by the wrist and started marching the both of them towards the front door. As they crossed the room, the apparition didn't move from where it stood—in fact, its body didn't move at all—but its _head_ turned to follow them.

_Honk-honk._

They were maybe three feet away from the door when the sound of that bicycle horn caused Rick and Gus to stop where they were and face the apparition again. It still hadn't budged from the middle of the foyer; but now it was holding up the cleaver.

Rick swallowed. He was rooted in place; his knees were knocking together. "Gus, I hate this. I hate this _so_ much."

Gus's mouth had gone dry. It took him several seconds to find his voice. "M-m-maybe if I... try t-talking to it?"

The phantom took one deliberate step in their direction, its movements jerky and uncanny.

"I—I don't think the Picard approach is gonna work here," said Rick. Terrified, he started looking around for anything that he could use as a weapon.

It was two steps closer. _Honk-honk._ Its arm was extended, the cleaver high over its head.

Rick stumbled into the umbrella-stand that had been sitting next to the front door. His groping hands found the shaft of a long object—he half expected a parasol or a walking-stick, but it turned out to be a fireplace-poker. That would do. He brandished the poker and shouted at the ghost, "All right, clown, that's it! You wanna get nuts!? Come on! _Let's get nuts!_ "

The apparition stopped—it tilted its head, as if it were regarding Rick with curiosity—and then it _vanished_ , melting away into a thin wisp of green smoke.

Rick held the fireplace-poker close to his chest and looked every which way; but the thing was gone, and it didn't reappear.

After a while, the tension seemed to melt away from the room, and Gus asked, "Did—did you just scare the ghost away—with a _Batman_ quote!?"

"I don't care!" said Rick. "We're leaving! I _hate_ clowns—you _know_ that—I hate them more than you hate bugs!"

"Yeah, you do," Gus mused. "What's up with that, anyway?"

"Seriously? Don't you remember my tenth birthday party?"

Gus's face lit up with understanding. "Oh. That."

"Yeah," said Rick. " _That._ Now can we _go_ already?"

But Gus didn't turn to leave with Rick. He was gazing at the floor, stroking his chin, deep in thought. Then, of a sudden, he snapped his fingers and punched a fist into his open palm. "I've got it!"

"Oh, no," said Rick. "I know that look. We are _not_ staying here, not one second longer. I draw the line at getting _knifed_ by Pennywise—"

Gus cut him off, breathless with excitement. "Not Pennywise. A psychoreactive, phobophagic metamorph!"

"Explain the Treknobabble before I slap you."

"You're afraid of clowns, and it was able to sense that, and use it to frighten us!" Gus gesticulated wildly as he spoke. "It's a fear-eater! An entity that can look like whatever it wants— _be_ whatever it wants—or whatever it _needs_ to be in order to scare us!"

Rick blinked. "So—it's a pookah."

"A what?"

Rick facepalmed. "You're a goddamn paranormalist, and you don't read folklore? Mythology!?"

"That's more your thing, buddy," said Gus.

" _Harvey._ You've seen _Harvey_ , right? Jimmy Stewart; invisible rabbit—" Rick's eyes drifted over to the wall behind Gus, up near the ceiling, and he blanched. "B-b-bug."

Gus shook his head. "Nah, I definitely wouldn't see a movie about a bug."

Rick tugged on Gus's shirtsleeve and pointed behind him. "Not the movie; there! Bug! _Big_ bug!"

Gus whirled around and saw the _thing_ sticking to the wall that had Rick freshly terrified. It was an enormous spiderlike arachnid monstrosity, with many glistening eyes, many creepy-crawly legs, a covering of chitin and black bristles, drooling mandibles, and a vicious-looking stinger jutting forth from its abdomen.

Discount Shelob, basically.

Gus and Rick both screamed. The spider-thing sprang from the wall with unearthly agility and fell upon Gus; it stung him once; and Gus slumped to the ground, unmoving.

Rick's cry of horror morphed into a bellow of rage. He felt the weight of the poker in his hands. Not knowing what else to do, he choked up on his weapon and swung it as hard as he could—it connected—but instead of the satisfying crunch and spatter of gore that Rick expected, something else altogether happened. The iron poker seemed to pass through the monster, but it still met with some small resistance that caused it to drag—as if the spider-thing were somehow at once both solid _and_ intangible. As the poker passed through its body, it drew a trail of blue sparks, and the spider-monster yawped out an inhuman shriek that was unmistakably a noise of great pain.

An instant later, the monster disappeared.

Rick wasted no time. He rushed over to Gus's side and felt for his pulse. Gus was alive; he was breathing; but he didn't stir. "Come on, bro, don't do this to me," said Rick. He tried shaking Gus, slapping him across the face, but nothing worked. Try as he might, Rick couldn't rouse his friend.

"Shit, shit, shit," he muttered, reaching for his cell phone. In a panic, he tried dialing 911; but he still couldn't seem to make any outgoing calls.

Not from inside the house, at any rate.

Fully determined now to leave this place and save Gus's life, Rick threw open the front door. He picked up Gus in a fireman's carry and bore him outside; made his way carefully down the porch-steps; and rested Gus supine on the sidewalk outside.

Desperate and wild-eyed, Rick took out his phone again and tried once more for an ambulance.

* * *

Gus had been admitted to Mt. Sinai Queens. He lay on the bed, eyes shut, still unresponsive. The only sound in the tiny hospital-room was the steady beep of the EKG monitor.

It was close to 5 AM now. Rick sat in the lone visitor's chair by Gus's bedside, his eyes glued to his smartphone. He browsed and read at a furious pace, flicking from site to site, webpage to webpage. Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Mythica, even some old archived GeoCities pages dating back to the "web 1.0" of yore.

_"...breathing on his own, but I can't think of any medical reason the patient should still be asleep like this..."_

_"...said it was some kind of bite or sting, but there are no marks on his body; just a hole in his shirt..."_

_"...be a couple of days, at least, before we get the tox screens back..."_

Rick only caught brief snippets of conversation between the attending physician and the nurses on rotation. Most of what they said, he ignored completely. He was too engrossed in his impromptu research-binge; his brain was working in overdrive.

The supernatural was real. Or, at least, _a_ supernatural thing was real. It took a great deal of focus on Rick's part not to dwell on this fact and its awesome implications. There wasn't time; not yet. He had to stay on track; he had to help Gus.

Had his first instinct been correct? Reading up on the pookah—or _púca_ in the Gaelic—led him to research other shapeshifting spirits, like the kelpie, nøkk, and nuckelavee. But those didn't seem to fit the bill: they were water-spirits, not house-spirits. And there was nothing in those creatures' legends that suggested they could sense people's fears.

Fear... maybe that was the key. Looking up the boogeyman proved fruitful indeed, since this particular creature of legend was related to the buggane, bugbear, bogey, boggle, and boggart, all various shades of fearsome hobgoblin. And hobgoblins in general _were_ house-spirits, like the English puck, the Slavic domovoi, the Irish clurichaun, the Scottish brownie—

Rick jumped to his feet and looked down at Gus's comatose form. "I know what it is!" he shouted.

"Know what _what_ is?"

Rick whirled around and saw that the doctor had just come into the room; she held a clipboard and medical chart under one arm.

"Oh—uh, nothing important really," stammered Rick after an awkward pause. "Just something me and my partner here were working on earlier."

"I have to admit, this case has me a little baffled," said the doctor, who crossed the room and hung the chart on the end of Gus's bed. "If you have any more information that could shed some light on the case—"

"Sorry," said Rick. "Not really. Not yet. Look, I, uh, I think I need to get out of here—"

"Yes, you do," said the doctor. She fixed Rick with a well-practiced, withering glare. "Visiting hours aren't until nine."

"You guys can—uh, call me? If anything changes?"

"We'll be sure to have someone do that, Mr. Carter."

"Okay. Great." Before the doctor could finish shooing him out of the room, Rick went over to Gus's side again, took the unconscious man's hand, and leaned down close. "Hang in there, bro," he whispered. "I've got an idea."

* * *

Rick didn't have the funds to spring for a cab, but it was only fifteen blocks or so to schlep from the hospital back to MacKenzie Manor on foot. He would probably make it there right at or just before sunrise.

On the way, Rick made a point to stop inside a convenience store, where he bought a bottle of whole milk and a pack of Twinkies.

* * *

Rick Carter was a young man who loved his books. His literary tastes were more varied these days and tended towards the classical and the romanticist; but as a kid, he'd been enraptured by myths and legends. Thomas Bulfinch, Edith Hamilton, and the Brothers Grimm were his perennial favorites—the upshot of all this being that he knew his folklore.

He turned the corner at 36th Avenue and picked up his pace: the old house was in sight now. Gus's van was still parked across the street, where it thankfully hadn't been disturbed.

The front door of MacKenzie Manor was shut. Rick had been the one to do that, hours earlier: while waiting for the paramedics to arrive, he'd searched through Gus's pockets for the house-key and used it to lock up, just in case. Now he crept up to the front porch and used that selfsame key to let himself back into the manor's foyer.

Rick's equipment-cases were now scattered haphazardly around the entry-hall. _Looks like the little bastard has been doing some more poltergeisting while I've been gone,_ he thought to himself. _Wait, wait; nope. Don't forget. It's not a ghost; it's a fucking fairy. That's why it didn't like the iron._

He cast about until his eyes fell upon the object he was searching for: the iron fireplace-poker with which he'd managed to hurt the creature. It was still lying on the floor, just where Rick had dropped it. _Perfect._ He picked it up; now suitably armed, he went back outside.

On the front stoop of the manor, he took out the things he'd purchased at the convenience store: he opened the milk, set the bottle down, and unwrapped the Twinkies, placing these next to it. Then, poker in hand, he crouched low and concealed himself in the bushes off to the side of the stoop—where he waited.

* * *

Sunrise came at about half past six.

In fairy tales, you could always appease a pissed-off brownie by leaving it cream and cakes before dawn. So Rick wasn't too terribly surprised when, at the very moment the sun was coming up, a misshapen little humanoid _thing_ materialized out of thin air on the porch.

It was rather goblinesque in appearance, no more than two feet tall, with pointed ears and a pointed nose, sharp yellow teeth, and one eye that bugged halfway out the socket so that it appeared larger than the other. It wore only a tattered brown tunic and walked with a bowlegged stance on duck-like feet. The creature immediately started devouring the Twinkies and slurping greedily from the milk-bottle.

Rick wasted no time. He leapt out of the bushes and shouted, "FORE!"

The brownie looked up from its meal just in time to see an angry human swinging an iron poker like a golf-club. **_THWACK!_** Rick brained the brownie on the head and laid it low. A second later, he was standing over the unconscious form of the little hobgoblin-creature and laughing off the adrenaline-rush. "You'd think a _Scottish_ spirit would've seen a golf-swing coming!"

He raised up the poker again to finish the critter off; only, then and there, something stayed his hand. The brownie wasn't by any means cute, or even vaguely pleasant to look at, but it was still a humanoid creature. It was a living thing—sort of—and definitely at least sentient, maybe even sapient. Looking down at the small and helpless creature now, Rick found that he simply couldn't bring himself to put it out of its misery.

It felt too much like... cold-blooded murder.

 _After all,_ he rationalized, _the thing was only defending its territory. Hell, that's probably why it was trying to scare us—not just for shits and giggles, but to get us out of its house. The house that it's bound to._ In that moment, Rick had an epiphany.

He got down on one knee, set the poker aside, and unlaced his right boot. He took off the boot, removed his sock, and then gently nudged at the unconscious brownie. "Hey there, little fella. Wake up. I have something for ya."

After a couple of minutes, the brownie's eyes fluttered, and its head began to loll from one side to the other. It groaned—its voice was high-pitched enough to remind Rick of the Munchkins from _The Wizard of Oz_ —and then sat up.

Rick held his sock out to the brownie. "Go on, little guy. Take it. I know it's a cliché, but—it's yours. A gift."

The brownie stood up and stared at Rick in seeming wonder and curiosity. Nervously, it reached out both hands and snatched the sock away from the human, so that it could examine the article of clothing up close.

"Now go on; get outta here, Dobby. Take a hike; hit the bricks. You're free."

"Free," repeated the brownie. It spoke with a lilting brogue. "What a lovely gift. I do think I'll make a cap out of it—" Here, the creature reached into a tunic-pocket and produced a razor-sharp dagger that was nearly as large as the brownie itself, like a cartoon character pulling a gag-mallet from hammerspace, "—after I've dyed it in yer _fooking blood_ , fleshbag!"

The brownie—the redcap—roared and brandished the dagger; Rick screamed for dear life, snatched up the fireplace-poker, and brought it down on the creature's head multiple times— ** _THWACK, THUMP, SMACK, CRUNCH, SMUSH, SPLAT._** "AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHGGGGGGHHHHHH..."

A short while later, a breathless Rick had dropped the poker into the puddle of pulp and gore at his knees. He was positively drenched in an absurd quantity of brownie-blood. Gobbets and viscera were splattered all over the stoop and the front door. He looked down at his red-stained hands: they were shaking.

He tried to pull himself together, to ignore the shock that was setting it. _Gotta go... see Gus soon. See if he woke up. But first... gotta clean off. Clean would be good. Dear God in heaven, please let this house have running water._


	2. An Elf Named Smith

Hours had passed. The shell-shock hadn't really worn off.

Earlier, back at the manor house, Rick had tried to clean himself up: wordless, businesslike, utterly perfunctory. _Just get it done; don't think about how you killed it. Don't think about how it could talk, and you killed it._ But, try as he might, he couldn't get the blood off.

And so, still reeling, still not quite processing everything that had happened, he had packed all of his equipment back into the rear compartment of Gus's van; locked the front door of the spooky old house; and driven home. There, he'd been able to take a shower—a _very long_ shower—and get a fresh change of clothes. Both were necessary: after all, it wasn't as if he could simply show up at the hospital looking like an extra from a Sam Raimi movie.

Now it was mid-morning, well into visiting hours, and Rick was back in Astoria, back at Mt. Sinai Queens. He stood in the hallway outside of Gus's hospital room, fighting to keep it together. He was frustrated at the situation in general; disgusted with himself over what he'd done; and above all, he felt more helpless than he'd ever felt before at any time in his life.

He'd hoped that destroying the redcap would have had some effect, broken the "spell" or whatever it was that kept Gus in a coma. But it hadn't worked. Gus was still totally unresponsive. And now Rick didn't know what to do.

Irritated at everything, he turned away from the door to Gus's room and went a ways down the hall. He took out his phone and tried Tracey again: but she didn't pick up. So he left yet another message. "Hey, Trace. Gimmie a call when you get this. I'd, uh, really like to hear your voice right now. Gus is still—there's no improvement. Just, uh, call me, okay? Please?"

He ended the call, thrust both hands into his pockets, and leaned back against the wall. He was all out of ideas. There was nothing more to do now, it seemed, but wait.

And so Rick waited; and he watched; hoping that perhaps the doctor would come back soon with news. Instead, somebody _else_ showed up.

A young woman, devastatingly beautiful, with her golden hair done up in a stern bun, marched down the hospital hallway. She wore a burgundy dress with a wide bustle that looked like something straight out of the Victorian period—or maybe it was Edwardian, Rick wasn't sure. She carried an umbrella under one arm and marched with animated, graceful steps, effortlessly dodging the swarm of nurses, patients, and doctors that crowded the halls.

Even stranger than the woman herself was her entourage: she was followed by a foursome of little men, barely half her height, wheeling a gurney. They all wore blue scrubs and surgical masks, the latter doing a poor job of hiding their long, forked and braided beards, which some of them had tucked into their waistbands.

And strangest of all was the fact that, despite these newcomers' obvious peculiarities, nobody at all was paying any of them the least little bit of attention. In fact, it seemed to Rick that he was the only one around who had even noticed their arrival. Patients didn't glance their way; not a single nurse so much as acknowledged their presence. Rick even watched a security guard stroll right by without giving them a second look.

When they stopped outside of Gus's room, Rick decided that this was just entirely too fishy. He stood up and called out, "Hey! What do you think you're you doing?"

The woman in the fancy dress didn't acknowledge him; she just opened the door to Gus's room and disappeared inside. Perturbed, Rick dashed over to the door, only to be stopped there by one of the little men in scrubs. "Are you Carter?" he asked with a deep, gruff voice and an accent that Rick couldn't place.

Rick stared. "How do you know my name?"

"Not my job to answer questions. You can take it up with the boss-lady when she's ready to make time for you."

Rick was about to argue, but he was interrupted by the strange woman's angelic voice, regal and with a posh British accent, coming from inside the room. "Oh, don't be such a crosspatch, Flóki. Do let the man pass."

Flóki grunted and stood aside. Rick wasted no time barging into the room, where the found the mysterious woman hovering at Gus's bedside. She was dangling a necklace—some sort of crystal on a chain—over Gus's head, just above his motionless lips. Her eyes were closed and she was whispering something under her breath.

Rick's first instinct was to say something snarky about New Age nonsense and crystal-healing bullshit, but something stopped him. Earlier that day, he'd bludgeoned a fairy to death with an iron stick. Gus was in a predicament that baffled medical science. Right now, skepticism seemed beyond foolish. So he instead settled for the obvious questions: "Who the hell are you people? And what are you doing to Gus?"

The woman opened her eyes and fixed them on Rick—they were green, of a depth that he'd never seen before; and they were _old_ , as if the woman behind them had lived long and seen some serious shit. In fact, Rick felt as if this strange woman were peering into his mind, gauging him, judging him… and then she spoke, and the spell was broken. "It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Carter," she said with a coy smile. "You may call me Mrs. Smith. And as for Mr. Weisz here, I am attempting to discern the precise nature of his ailment."

"Um; why?"

"Because, my dear fellow, nobody else here can help him." She slipped the crystal pendant into a pocket in her voluminous dress and touched her umbrella to the floor, leaning on it like a walking stick. She looked over Gus in silence for a long moment, apparently deep in thought, and then asked, "Is there anything you can tell me about what happened to him? The truth, if you please; as many details as you can recall."

Rick shook his head. This was—just plain crazy, is what it was. "Uh… he got, um, stung. By a—a giant bug-thing. Or maybe it was just an illusion of one. I'm not sure."

Mrs. Smith quirked an eyebrow. "Oh? What makes you say that?"

"Well, um—we were in this house. And there was a—a goblin-thing. Little guy. Angry bastard, too. I think it was a redcap—"

"Aha! Now we're getting somewhere: a rogue house-spirit. Theirs is a bothersome sort of magic, but hardly insurmountable."

Rick felt his mouth go dry. "Magic…?"

"Yes, Mr. Carter, magic. Obviously magic. Why else do you imagine I'm here?" As she spoke, Mrs. Smith demurely raised one hand up to her head and brushed a lock of golden hair past her ear—revealing said ear to be long and pointed.

Rick was astonished. "You're—you're an elf."

"That is correct, Mr. Carter."

"An elf… named Smith?" For whatever reason, something about that seemed wrong to Rick.

"Tamariel Smith, at your service. Now then: to business. The redcap that enchanted Mr. Weisz: where is it now?"

Rick felt his cheeks get warm. He hung his head. "It's, uh… it's dead."

"Your doing?" There was no judgement in Mrs. Smith's voice; merely curiosity.

Rick nodded while avoiding her gaze. "Yeah."

"Look at me, Mr. Carter."

Rick looked up.

Mrs. Smith was smiling. She gently shook her head and said wonderingly, "A _mortal_ slays a redcap… as I live and breathe. However did you manage it?"

Rick cleared his throat and looked around the room nervously. He really didn't want to talk about this. But if it could help Gus… "Um. I remembered how things worked—in fairy tales. Lured it out with milk and cake. When it—uh, when it attacked me, I hit it. With iron."

Mrs. Smith nodded and said, "Well; that _would_ do the job. And you honor the old ways, too. That's… unexpected, but commendable."

"You're not… mad that I killed it? Murdered one of your… fellow fae?"

"It certainly sounds like self-defense to me," said Mrs. Smith. "And besides, redcaps are a menace. Homicidally insane, and sadly incurable. So, chin up, Mr. Carter. You'll receive no moral judgement from the likes of me! Although…" her voice trailed off.

"What?"

"Well, it does make our job rather more difficult. With the readcap dead, we cannot compel it to lift the curse…" Mrs. Smith looked down at Gus again, and after a few seconds' thought, she snapped her fingers and said, "That settles it. Mr. Weisz will simply have to come with us."

Rick wasn't sure that he'd heard that right. He pinched the bridge of his nose and said, "Come with—where?"

Mrs. Smith answered by clapping her hands twice and calling out to the four dwarves waiting patiently in the hallway: "Gentlemen! Bring the trolley and fetch Mr. Weisz. We're taking him back to Faircourt."

"Faircourt," echoed Rick. "Where is—I mean, what is that?"

"All in good time, Mr. Carter," said Mrs. Smith. "You're welcome to join us, of course. In fact, I insist." As she spoke, the four dwarves wheeled the gurney into the room, placed it next to Gus's bed, and transferred him over with a quick, "One–two–lift!"

Mrs. Smith made for the exit, only pausing at the doorway long enough to look over her shoulder at Rick. "With me, now, Mr. Carter, and step lively. Time is of the essence in matters such as these—chop-chop!" She pointed her umbrella like a drum-major's baton and marched out into the hallway. The dwarves made haste to follow her, keeping Gus between them on the gurney.

Rick stared dumbly after the cadre of fae-folk, letting his brain catch up with everything that had just transpired. Had… had he just let some freaky-deaky, fin-de-siècle, pointy-eared Mary Poppins kidnap his friend? Screw that noise! He jogged out into the hall and gave chase.

* * *

Rick speedily caught up with Mrs. Smith and held up one finger to get her attention. "Hey—excuse me! You still haven't explained where you're taking Gus."

"Haven't I?" said Mrs. Smith as she walked. "We're transferring him to the Faircourt Building."

"Right," said Rick. "And what is that, exactly? Some sort of special hospital for—" he paused, looked around warily, and lowered his voice, "—for fairy-people?"

"That, and a great deal more," said Mrs. Smith cryptically. "But it will be much easier to show you than to tell you."

They marched together through the hallways of the hospital, Mrs. Smith leading the lot of them—to where, Rick couldn't begin to guess, but he was certain that they weren't heading for the elevators. As before, nobody else paid them the slightest bit of attention, even though they must have made for a bizarre procession indeed, the four dwarves in scrubs wheeling Gus on the gurney and following behind the primly-dressed Mrs. Smith.

Rick couldn't help but ask. "Um—stupid question; maybe. I don't know. But, uh, why is it that nobody around here seems to, you know, _notice_ you?"

"Because they don't _want_ to notice," said Mrs. Smith. "The application of a simple obfuscation-charm, in combination with your obstinate human nature, effects our discretion quite nicely, if I do say so myself."

"Obstinate—" said Rick. "What the crap is _that_ supposed to mean?"

Mrs. Smith stopped walking—the dwarves had to react quickly to keep the Gus-bearing gurney from running her over—and turned to face Rick. With unbridled enthusiasm, she exclaimed, "Why, it's your species' greatest weakness—and strength! Your sheer, unvarnished, cussed _determination_ to master your surroundings!"

Rick folded his arms. "How is it a strength to have the wool pulled over our eyes? To have this—this other _reality_ out there that we can't see, and have it _hidden_ from us!?"

Mrs. Smith smiled and touched a finger to the side of her nose. "Ah, but is reality being hidden from you? Or are you humans _defining_ it?" She casually pointed at a nearby, unmarked door with her thumb and added, "We're here, by the way."

Rick glanced at the door. "That—is a broom-closet."

"Is it?" Mrs. Smith gestured, inviting Rick to open the door and see for himself.

He did; and, sure enough, on the other side he found only a tiny closet-space containing mops, brooms, buckets, bleach-bottles, and sundry other cleaning supplies. "You were saying?"

Mrs. Smith's knowing grin never wavered. "Please be so kind as close the door again, Mr. Carter."

He did that too; but this time, Mrs. Smith rapped on the door with the handle of her umbrella—" _BUMP–bump–bump–BUMP–bump_ "—the first five beats to "Shave and a Haircut." Rick started when some unseen person on the other side answered back with two quick knocks—" _BUMP–BUMP_." (And naturally, Rick couldn't help but supply mentally, _Two bits!_ )

"Would you care to do the honors?" asked Mrs. Smith.

Little knowing what to expect, Rick turned the knob again and pushed the door open—only now, instead of a broom-closet, it opened into a long and narrow hallway, empty of occupants, with dark green carpeting and yellow-spotted wallpaper (both of which looked at least a hundred and fifty years out of style, maybe more). There were gas-lamps affixed to the walls at regular intervals, all lit; and a great many brass-knobbed doors marked with numbers etched in copperplate. The regular pattern was broken up by the occasional hung painting or daguerreotype photograph, or an elegant piece of bric-a-brac standing on a small side-table.

Mrs. Smith indicated the anomalous hallway and said, "Shall we?"

* * *

Rick followed Mrs. Smith through a dizzying maze of narrow corridors, each one looking like it had been decorated at some point during the nineteenth century. Behind them, the four dwarves carefully pushed Gus's gurney and made a heroic effort to avoid bumping into the décor or scraping the paper off the walls at each claustrophobic corner that they turned.

At last, Mrs. Smith came to a halt in front of an unassuming door that looked just like all the many others that they'd passed. "Here we are," she said. "Number 712 ought to be unoccupied at the moment." She opened the door, revealing a comfortable little bedroom with old-fashioned furniture and a wide window that looked out over a space of decidedly familiar greenery with a line of skyscrapers just beyond.

While the dwarves moved Gus onto the bed, Rick went over to the window and boggled at what he saw. "Is that— _Central Park_!?"

"Indeed," said Mrs. Smith. "The Faircourt Building stands on 5th Avenue."

"We're in _Manhattan._ A minute ago we were in Queens, and now…" Rick couldn't help but ask. "How, exactly, did we get here?"

"It's called a dimensional door," said Mrs. Smith. "Or a 'dim-door,' for short. A rather complex bit of magic, as magic goes; but I've had many decades to place my doors throughout the city. They're indispensable to all my organization's many, ah, dealings."

Rick looked sidelong at Mrs. Smith and prompted, "Organization?"

"The Faircourt Agency," said Mrs. Smith. "This building's chief purpose is to serve as the Agency's main office. As well as to be a safe-haven for all of the faes, halflings, chimeras, and other magical beings who call the Tri-State Area home."

"Huh," was all Rick could manage to say. He glanced over at Gus, who was sleeping soundly on the bed without snoring. The dwarves had already made a quiet exit form the room and taken the gurney with them. "This is all pretty damned, uh—"

"Overwhelming, I should imagine," offered Mrs. Smith. "Believe me, I do sympathize."

Rick nodded. "I have questions."

"I thought you might."

He took that as an invitation. "How did you find out about me and Gus? How'd you know he was in trouble?"

"Naturally, I make it a point to keep tabs on local occultists and paranormalists. Just in case you stumble across something you shouldn't."

"And if that happens, this Agency of yours, it steps in and—does what?"

Mrs. Smith placed her hands behind her back and faced the window. "Officially, the Faircourt Agency is tasked with acting in the mortal realm on behalf of the Fair Folk ruling council—"

"So that's 'Faircourt,' as in, 'Fairy Court,'" guessed Rick.

The elf-woman graced her deceptively youthful face with another lovely smile. "I'm pleased that you begin to understand. We are charged with protecting magical beings; minimizing any damage done by creatures of darkness; and keeping humanity insulated from all things supernatural—for your own benefit, I assure you."

"Uh-huh. Then why are you telling me all this? I mean, why am I here?" A sudden, horrible thought came unbidden to his mind, and he took a step back towards the door. "You're not—planning on erasing my memory, are you?"

"We're not monsters, Mr. Carter," said Mrs. Smith with a girlish giggle and a subtle shake of her head. "I've invited you here because—well, perhaps that is a discussion best saved for later. You've had a long night, and you should get some rest. Whereas I must attend to the delicate business of aiding Mr. Weisz's convalescence."

Rick looked over at Gus again. "What can you do for him?"

"We have resources here that could never be brought to bear in a human hospital," said Mrs. Smith. "The first step is a series of basic divinations to ascertain the nature of the curse. That should be quite safe. Beyond that… well, let's just say that it's dangerous business, mixing magicks blindly. Throwing out counter-curses and dispensation-charms willy-nilly would be apt to cause far more harm than good."

Rick nodded. "Then, uh, I guess I'll let you get to work."

"That would be best," said Mrs. Smith. "I'll have Hans show you to a room where you can get some sleep. You have, after all, been through quite the ordeal."

At that very moment, a small form appeared in the bedroom's open doorway. The newcomer cleared his throat; Rick turned to see a little man, shorter than a dwarf, with slightly pointed ears and a large, ruddy nose, wearing a three-piece suit the color of gray granite. He motioned for Rick to come with him and said, "Follow me, pal."

Rick stumbled to reply, but before he could get a word in edgewise, Mrs. Smith sternly shooed him out of the room. "Later," she said again, and she closed the door behind them. The elf-woman then leaned back against the doorjamb and breathed a sigh of consternation. She shook her head, smiled, and muttered, "Humans."

* * *

Rick followed the diminutive valet through the labyrinthine hallways of the Faircourt Building. "So… Hans, was it?"

"That's right."

"Hope this isn't rude to ask, but, you're a, um, a…"

"Yeah, yeah; I'm a gnome," said Hans, a little petulantly. "And before you even start, believe me, I've heard _every_ wisecrack. No place like gnome? Gnome is where the heart is? Gnome sweet gnome? Check, check, and check. So let's just skip over all of _that_ crap and move on, _capisce_?"

Rick threw up his hands in a gesture of surrender. "Whoa, whoa, okay. Just making small-talk."

Hans stopped short in the middle of the corridor so that he could glare up at the human.

Rick tried to resist, honestly he did, but he just couldn't help himself. "…No pun intended?"

"Grk—and no short-jokes either!" sputtered Hans. The gnome waved a hand down the corridor and said, "You know what? You can find the rest of the way by yourself. Suite 736. That'll be your new digs for as long as you decide to stick around." After that, he spun on his heel and headed back the way they'd just come.

"Hey!" shouted Rick. "Where're you going!?"

"I've got work to do!" snapped Hans without looking back. "Get some shut-eye, human! Maybe then, you'll be a little more _polite_! Big palooka…" With that, the gnome turned a corner and disappeared.

Rick snorted. "Touchy little twerp," he muttered.

* * *

Rick rolled over onto one side and murmured in sleepy contentment. The bed was indescribably soft, the down mattress and pillow just perfect; and he had been bone-tired all morning, physically and mentally exhausted. It was no wonder that he'd been able to sleep the rest of the day away.

His eyes snapped open. The waning light of a summer's evening streamed in through the window. At once, it all came back to him. Gus. Magic. The Fair Folk. He threw off the covers, sat up in bed, and groped for his phone. He found the device resting on a nearby nightstand; but it was dead, which was odd, because it should have had plenty of battery-life remaining. He looked around: sure enough, he was still in the Faircourt Building, still in Suite 736, in a bedroom that looked like it could've been plucked from a Jane Austen novel. Rick rubbed the sleep from his eyes and ran a hand over his face. What time was it? And, more importantly: was this truly his reality now? Or would he awaken from it at some point, as if it were all naught but a strange and half-remembered dream?

There was a gaslight fixture above the nightstand; a quick search of the drawers turned up a book of matches. After a bit of fiddling with the valve, Rick managed to get the gas flowing and light the lamp. This illuminated the bedroom fully and allowed Rick to spot something else: a silver tea-tray, sitting on a round wooden table by the door, upon which sat a small golden hand-bell and a folded note of yellowed parchment. Thinking it best, he immediately opened the note and read by the lamplight. The curt message was penned neatly in a calligraphic round-hand:

> _Mr. Richard Carter—_
> 
> _Your things are in the closet. When you've dressed  
>  for dinner, ring for Hans. He'll show you the way._
> 
> _—Cordially yours,  
>  Mrs. Tamariel Smith_

"Christ, this is like a bad movie," grumbled Rick to himself. "Wake up one minute, and I'm in Harry Potter's bizarro nightmare." He looked down and read the note again. It was asking him to change for dinner. He was still wearing the clothes he'd thrown on at his apartment earlier that morning, his customary blue-jeans and flannel. With a shrug, he checked out the room again. The door by the table led out into an overly-fancy sitting-room, the main room of the suite—Rick faintly recalled having trudged through it like a zombie on his way to collapsing in the bedroom. Beyond that, he knew, was the hallway; but he wasn't about to attempt that maze without a guide quite yet. There were two more doors here in the bedroom. He tried one of these and found a rather posh-looking, if old-fashioned, bathroom. Opening the other door caused Rick's jaw to drop.

It was an immense walk-in closet, with rows of hanging clothes and shelves piled with things—all of his own clothes, and all of his own things. Every single item he possessed (furniture excluded) had somehow, in the span of a few hours, been transported into this room and neatly arranged for his convenience. "Great. They broke into my apartment last night too." Not wanting to spare the brainpower trying to figure this latest weirdness out, he grabbed a collared shirt and a pair of slacks off of the nearest rack and went to go clean up.

Half a moment later, Rick smacked himself on the head and went back into the closet for his toothbrush and razor.

* * *

About three seconds after the last note from the little golden bell died away, an insistent hand rapped on the sitting-room door. Rick, at long last both rested and presentable, opened the door and admitted Hans the gnome. Hans looked up at Rick and whistled. "Lookin' sharp, there, Carter. That's good: the boss likes it when the new blood cleans up nice. I think you'll impress her!"

"You mean Mrs. Smith?"

"Who else?" asked the gnome. "I wouldn't worry yourself too much, though. Mrs. S., she's kinda sweet on humans. More than most elves are, anyway."

Rick didn't know quite how to respond to that. "If you say so."

"I do say so," said Hans. "Now, c'mon. The boss wanted me to give you the two-dollar tour of the place. But we're running a little late—dinner's at eight sharp, and you sure took your sweet time getting up—so we'll have to cut it short if we don't want to run." He bobbed his head towards the hallway. "Let's get going."

Rick followed Hans out into the corridors. As the gnome led the human through a bewildering sequence of passageways, intersections, and turns, a million new questions popped into Rick's mind. "Hey, where exactly are we going? And why did you people bring all my stuff here? And is there any word on my friend yet?"

"Whoa, slow down there, sport." Hans chortled and said, "Trust me. You'll figure out how things work around here pretty soon. In the meantime, just relax and come along for the ride, okay?"

They turned another corner and came to the end of the hallway, to an old-timey elevator with a door of iron grating and an operating lever. Hans slid open the gate and said, "All aboard. Mind the gap."

Rick followed the gnome into the box. Hans gripped the lever and gave it a powerful pull. "Going down!" And just like that, the elevator dropped. Quickly. Rick felt a queasy sensation of weightlessness. There seemed to be no telling just how far they were descending, but the distance must have been considerable, because it was taking quite a while—and lights from a great many floors whizzed by as they fell.

Rick stood still and stared straight ahead. It was all finally starting to catch up to him. Magic was real. Fairies were real. He was riding in an elevator next to a fast-talking gnome and going to meet a pretty elf-girl for a dinner-date, where he would hopefully get some news about the literal sleeping-beauty curse afflicting his best friend. "Un-be-fucking-lievable," he whispered under his breath.

Hans glanced up at the human. "You say somethin', chief?"

Rick shrugged and didn't respond.

The elevator suddenly dinged and screeched to a halt. "Bottom floor," said the gnome. "This is where we get off." Hans pulled open the gate, and he and Rick stepped out onto a catwalk overlooking an enormous, cavernous room. The chamber was filled with what looked like an endless array of brass mechanical arms, extending as far as the eye could see in all directions. It was perfectly still and quiet down here, though: whatever this machine was, it wasn't running at the moment. As Rick stared at this immense and complicated contrivance, Hans came up behind him and answered the unasked question. "It's a Babbage engine. In case you were wondering."

Rick looked down at the gnome in surprise. This huge cavern, all these articulated brass relays… they were part of an analytical engine more than a century obsolete? "A mechanical computer? What for?"

"Even the Agency needs to use a computer from time to time," said Hans. "But we can't bring regular ones into the building. Modern electronics, they interfere with the flow of aetheric energies in a bad way. So, we've got this hunk of junk. A whole sixty-four kilobytes of memory, and it only takes two whole days to finish a calculation. Kind of sad, isn't it, when vacuum tubes from the forties would be a massive upgrade for us?"

Hans led Rick along the catwalk, toward a spiral staircase that wound down to the cavern floor. As they walked, Rick asked, "Isn't there any way to shield a normal computer from the ether-whatsit, uh, magic?"

"Who knows?" asked the gnome. "You're the expert on human tech. Hey, you think maybe that's why Mrs. S. wants you here?"

"I have no friggin' clue," answered Rick. He snorted and added, "Maybe she just wants to keep an eye on me. So I don't go running off to the papers with some nutjob story about elves."

Just then, Rick and Hans turned a corner between two of the huge relay-arm arrays that made up the Babbage engine, and they ran straight into a waiting Mrs. Smith. Rick turned red; it was apparent from the smug look on the elf-woman's face that she'd just heard every word he'd said. "Of course you can always _try_ going to the media, Mr. Carter, but somehow I doubt they'd take you seriously. As to my ulterior motives… let's discuss them over dinner, shall we? You must be hungry. Right this way, if you please." With a nod, the elf dismissed Hans, who ambled off back towards the elevator. Rick, meanwhile, followed Mrs. Smith to a side-passage that led away from the enormous computer-cavern.

* * *

The underground dining room was furnished with a long table, chairs that almost looked like thrones, tapestries to insulate the cold walls of hewn stone, and even a row of ceremonial suits of armor bearing pollaxes. Rick could almost believe that he was dining in a medieval castle, albeit one lit by gaslight rather than oil lamps and candles. The table was spread with an impressive array of breads, meats, fruits, and cheeses, plus a bottle of wine with the vintage labeled in flowing Elvish script.

Mrs. Smith took a seat at the head of the table and invited Rick to sit at her right hand. She then began to dine without preamble, while at the same time reaching for a file-folder that sat on the table just to the left of her place. "First thing's first," she said, opening the folder and popping a large grape into her mouth. "I expect you're eager for an update on Mr. Weisz's condition."

Rick leaned forward in his seat. "I'm all ears."

"My examinations have turned up both good news and bad," said Mrs. Smith. "To put it simply, the curse that lies upon your friend cannot be undone through magical means—"

"What!?"

Mrs. Smith raised a placating hand. "Please, allow me to finish. It's true, we cannot simply wave a magic wand and cure your friend; but, in his favor, he's human. His natural aversion to magic is fighting off the curse as we speak—like an immune response."

"So what does that mean?" asked Rick.

"It means that in my professional opinion, he'll eventually wake from the enchanted slumber on his own. He merely requires time."

Rick leaned back. "How long?"

"Difficult to say. Hours; days. Possibly a couple of weeks, but that's an unlikely scenario."

"Isn't there anything else you can try?"

"That depends," said Mrs. Smith. "Is Mr. Weisz—involved with anyone at the moment? Romantically?"

Rick narrowed his eyes. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"Well, in matters such as these, True Love's Kiss has been known to prove effective…" Mrs. Smith trailed off and let the implication hang in the air.

"He's doomed," Rick deadpanned.

The elf-woman giggled coquettishly and said, "I see. The waiting-game it is, then. Very well; onto our next order of business." Here, she took a sheet of paper from the file-folder and glanced over it, refreshing her memory. "It says here, Mr. Carter—pardon me, but do you mind terribly if I call you 'Richard?'"

"Nobody calls me that. Not even my mom."

"It says here that you're still at university. You study electronic and computer engineering?"

"Yeah, that's right…" Rick wondered where Mrs. Smith was going with these questions.

She looked down at the paper again and continued, "Let me see… known associates, Theresa Wilkins, fiancée—oh, how lovely—and an aspiring actress, good for her. And, of course, Augustus Weisz, childhood friend, fellow paranormalist—"

Rick interrupted, "No, no, that's not—Gus is the paranormalist, not me. I just operate the gadgets."

"Then you're a paranormal _technologist_ , at the very least," countered Mrs. Smith. "Very good… yes, very good indeed. I'll come straight to the point, Richard."

Rick took a swig of wine from his goblet—it was strong stuff, and like nothing he'd ever tasted before—and said, "Oh, _please_ do."

"I want you to consider joining the Agency. We could use someone with your technical expertise. And, unless I'm quite mistaken, you've become intrigued by your meager glimpse of the magical world."

"Well; not as much as Gus would be. But I did read a whole bunch of folklore as a kid. I guess—I'm just wondering, what is it that I'd be able to do for you? The gnome guy said that you couldn't have any computers or electronics down here—hell, even my phone doesn't work in the building—and that's pretty much my whole area. I wouldn't be much use working on anything else."

"Maybe; maybe not," replied Mrs. Smith. "For one thing, I've called in another expert on human technology. Once she arrives, the two of you may be able to work together to solve some of our more persistent technical problems. But she's faerie; you're human. We can't succeed without your help."

"Why not?" asked Rick, genuinely curious.

"Advanced human sciences… they tend to escape us. We Fair Folk have a knack for magic, for sorcery; but information technologies? High-energy physics? Molecular biology? We simply can't do it. All peoples have their limitations, Richard. Except, so it would seem, for humans. Your ability to understand the natural world is truly limitless. As a species, you have so much potential. Which is why the Fairy Court has decreed that we're to remain hidden. _We're staying out of your way._ "

Rick shook his head. "That doesn't make much sense to me. What's the use in hiding the truth from people? If you shared your magic with the world, you could accomplish all kinds of things! There's so much… human suffering that you could help with."

Mrs. Smith looked down at her plate dolefully. "If only it were that simple. But even magic cannot fix all the world's evils. Any suffering that we alleviated would be more than matched by magic's potential to do great harm. Irreparable harm.

"And anyway, just think for a moment. Humans have believed in magic for thousands of years. It's only in the last few hundred that you've enjoyed an age of reason and science and technological advancement. Developed medical science; invented the computer and networked the planet; taken yourselves from gliders to space-shuttles in under a century. For the sake of the world, for your future, it's better this way. If humanity knew of magic, it would only drag you back down into a dark age."

"I… couldn't disagree more," said Rick. "I may not know much about magic yet, but whatever it is, it exists. Which means that it's just as natural as gravity or electricity. It's nothing but a fundamental force that we humans don't understand yet. But we _could_ —if we had the chance to study it scientifically."

Mrs. Smith smiled at that. "Human optimism. It really is your species' most endearing quality." When Rick frowned, she quickly added, "I mean that in all seriousness. Pray don't mistake my words for condescension." After a short pause, she added, "Well, why don't we start small? I'll give you a laboratory here at Agency headquarters. Once my specialist arrives, we'll see if the two of you can't get an electronic computer to function properly in a location saturated with aethereal vibrations. Then we'll move on from there."

Rick sat back in his oversized wooden chair and nodded. He had already made his decision; it was too fantastic an opportunity to pass up. "Okay. I'm in. Sign me up."

"Excellent," said Mrs. Smith. "It's wonderful to have you aboard, Richard. And I should say, during day-to-day operations, we're actually rather informal here; you may call me Tamariel if you like."

Rick shrugged. "Whatever you say; you're the boss. So, um, when is your 'specialist' supposed to get here, anyway?"

"Inside of a month," Tamariel answered.

"And what am I supposed to do in the meantime?"

The elf grinned in such a knowing manner that Rick was actually unnerved by the sight. "Meet me in my office on the 57th floor, tomorrow morning, after you've had the chance to get better acquainted with the building. I'll have your first assignment ready by then."

Rick said nothing and nervously picked at the food on his plate. What in the world had he just gotten himself into?

* * *

At 10:00 AM sharp, Rick Carter met with Mrs. Smith in her office, back in the aboveground portion of the Faircourt Building. In the meantime, Rick had learned quite a bit about the place. He'd been informed that, while much of the Agency HQ was indeed located underground, the majority of the organization's operations (and magical clientele) were housed in the upper floors of the Manhattan high-rise. The building itself was laced on the outside with layer upon layer of charms and glamours, so that mortals wouldn't pay it much attention. If you weren't in the know, you could stand right on the corner of 5th Avenue and 70th Street and stare straight at the anomalous skyscraper, but you'd never even see that it was there.

Mrs. Smith's office was comfortably-appointed, and cluttered with the signs of too much work to do in too little time. The desk was covered with papers and parchments in messy stacks, a variety of inkwells, and scattered feather-quills. There were a number of photographs hanging on the walls, all of them black-and-white. A brick fireplace dominated the wall of the room opposite the desk, complete with a couple of easy-chairs, a stand with brass pokers, and a brandy decanter on the mantle. A wide window across from the leather-upholstered double-door entryway gave a great view of Manhattan's Upper East Side.

When Rick came inside, Tamariel was still shuffling through a stack of curled vellum scrolls. "Ah. Richard. Do come in. I was only just finishing up some paperwork." She gestured for him to sit in a plush chair that faced her desk.

Rick strode across the room and plopped himself down. While Tamariel rolled up scrolls and set them aside one by one, he idly examined an old photograph that stood on her desk. It showed a handsome young man in a military uniform, standing at attention. "Who's this?" he asked, pointing at the picture.

Tamariel looked up and met Rick's gaze with a far-off look in her eyes. "That was Mr. Smith," she said quietly. "Reginald was a pilot in the RAF. He was shot down by the Nazis over Berlin in '45."

"Oh," said Rick, suddenly flustered. "I'm—I'm sorry, I had no idea."

All too quickly, Tamariel recovered her composure. "It's ancient history, of course. Now, to business. I've been thinking about what to do with you, and I believe that I've hit upon just the thing. This assignment shouldn't be too dangerous, but it will test your capacity as a field agent. Under ordinary circumstances, of course, we'd never send a rookie into the field without extensive training, but…"

"But, what?"

"As it happens, we're stretched a bit thin at the moment. Most of our operatives are assigned to major cases, and we simply haven't had the manpower to attend to every little matter that requires looking into."

Rick nodded. "In that case, I'll do my best. What's the job?"

"I thought you'd never ask," said Tamariel with a smile. Spreading a map of New York state on her desk, she pointed to a spot in the middle of nowhere. "You'll be going here, to a place called Two Bears Lake. We've heard reports of mysterious sightings, unexplained phenomena, and even a few disappearances. Whatever's happening there, it has something to do with that lake. Your assignment is to uncover the mystery and, if you deem it necessary, put a stop to the disturbances."

Rick pondered in silence while he stared at the map. "So, you want me to head upstate—and investigate a lake?"

"That's correct."

"Sounds kinda… boring."

Tamariel shot Rick a chastising look. "That's quite beside the point. In my judgment, this assignment will be more than adequate to put you through your paces."

"Uh, okay then. When do I leave?"

"Immediately," said the elf. "I've taken the liberty of moving Mr. Weisz's vehicle to the Faircourt Building's garage." She opened a desk-drawer, produced a wallet, and handed it over to Rick. "This contains a credit card in the Agency's name and a private detective's license in yours. That should help to excuse you for snooping, at the very least." With that, she rose and offered her hand to Rick, who shook it heartily. "Good luck, Agent Carter. And congratulations on your first assignment with the Agency."


	3. The Terror at Two Bears Lake

The following day, Richard Carter, newly-minted rookie operative for the Faircourt Agency, found himself driving up Interstate 87. He was bound for the middle of Nowhere, USA—or, rather, he was bound for the town of Two Bears Lake, which sat on the shore of a lake by the same name. Rick was pretty sure that he was heading into the most hillbilly, one-stoplight, no-account part of upstate New York that he'd ever likely see in his life. He only hoped that it didn't have that creepy _Deliverance_ vibe. No city-slicker wanted to experience that.

The very instant that he had driven clear of the Faircourt Building's parking garage earlier that morning, Rick's phone had come back to life and alerted him of several missed calls and a voice-mail from Tracey. It was the first that he'd heard from her since the whole "haunted house" incident; she sounded thoroughly sympathetic. " _Hey sweetie. Looks like we missed each other again. I was_ so _sorry to hear about Gus; I hope he gets better! You'll let me know if anything changes, right? … Anyway, sorry I missed your calls from earlier. I was—out last night, with the girls. Had to celebrate after landing that audition, you know? Speaking of which—Christ, is that the time!? Shit, I've gotta go! Wish me luck! Love you, babe!_ (*smooch*)"

Naturally, Rick had tried calling her back immediately, but after a few tries, she hadn't picked up, and so he'd been forced to leave yet another message. He _hated_ playing phone-tag. But with his fiancée out in Hollywood for the time being, what could he do beyond keep in touch and wait for her to get home?

* * *

By the middle of the afternoon, Rick had pulled the van off a winding county road in upstate New York and onto a bumpy dirt trail that the map had said would take him the rest of the way to the town. The trees grew thick on both sides of the road, shading nearly everything from view and sticking their roots out in rough ribs on the track that made the van shudder every time a tire hit one. Eventually, Rick rounded a bend where some of the trees had been cleared away to make room for a sign: "Two Bears Lake. 5 mi. Pop. 42." The paint on the "2" in "42" was obviously newer than the rest of the sign. "You've got to be kidding me," Rick mumbled under his breath.

Another three miles up the road, he spotted a little wooden shack with a sign advertising gasoline and fishing bait. A pair of 1950s style gas pumps stood near the road, while on the porch out in front of the shack itself, Rick could just make out the sight of a man in a rocking chair. Noticing that the van's tank was less than a quarter full, Rick figured that he might as well stop here and meet one of the locals right off the bat. He veered off the road and pulled to a stop next to the pumps.

On the porch, the rocking man was whittling on a block of pine with a pocket-knife. He was maybe thirty, balding, wearing cutoff jeans and a white tank-top soaked through with sweat. On the porch next to him, a number of whittled figures—mostly crude toy boats—rested on the railing and on a makeshift table comprised of a scrap of plywood atop an empty oil-drum. A russet-furred bloodhound slept on the stoop before the door. The dog occasionally snapped its jaws or kicked a hind leg but never once opened its eyes.

While Rick shut off the van and jumped outside to stretch his legs, the man on the porch stood up, scratched lazily, and jabbed the pocket-knife firmly into the block of wood. He left the block on the seat of his rocking-chair, put his hands in his pockets, and ambled over to the gas pumps. "Hey, stranger," he said, sounding neither friendly nor especially cold. "Heading down to the lake?"

Rick ran a hand through the mop of hair on his head, looked up at the beating summer sun, and wished not for the first time today that he'd thought to bring some sunglasses along. "Yeah, that's the plan."

The local man started working the pump and commented, "Good time for it. This time of year, best trout fishing this side of the Great Lakes. If you plan on angling for trout, you'll want some bait."

"Uh… no, thanks," said Rick. "I'm not fishing. More like… sightseeing."

The other man looked up from the pump and shot Rick a funny look. "Can't imagine what anyone would want to see in Two Bears except the lake."

Rick sucked in a breath. Well, he thought to himself, it was now or never. He would have to start asking lots of questions if he wanted to figure out what was happening here. "So… have you heard about anything… strange going on around here? Having to do with the town… or the lake?"

The local remained silent as he finished pumping the gas. Then he closed the tank lid on the van, hung up the pump, and said, "Mark my words: good time for trout, 'specially just before sunup. You'd have to go all the way to Minnesota for better fishing. Sure you don't want some minnows? Make 'em bite like crazy."

"I'm pretty sure. No thanks." Rick paid the man for the gasoline and very quickly climbed back into his van. A moment later, he was speeding down the trail the rest of the way to the town.

* * *

The dirt road gave way to a stretch of brick-paved street—apparently the only street in town, and it didn't even have a stoplight. The town of Two Bears Lake consisted of two rows of buildings flanking the street, most of them three stories high and painted white. The street curved down to the lakefront, past a couple of modest looking houses, where a handful of cabins could just be seen. The lake itself was actually pretty big—Rick could only barely make out the far shore, and pine-covered bluffs entirely obscured the eastern bank from sight. The truth be told, it was downright picturesque.

Rick pulled the van up to the curbside, a few feet behind a rusty pickup truck, next to a diner with the screen door propped open by a stone flowerpot. He climbed out, slammed the driver's side door, and locked the vehicle. Then he ambled into the diner.

It was a scene of small-town peace and quiet. About half a dozen patrons graced the diner, most of them in plaid shirts and ball-caps. Rick walked up to the counter and sat down on a stool cushioned with tacky orange vinyl. A few pairs of eyes glanced up from coffee cups to stare at the newcomer, but never for long enough to push the bounds of politesse. A swinging door between the diner floor and the kitchen area pushed open to admit the waitress. She was in her twenties, bleach-blonde, and pretty. She flashed Rick a smile, leaned across from him on the counter, and asked, "What'll it be, stranger? I recommend the special."

Rick struck a friendly tone and asked, "What's the special?"

"Cherry pie. Best in the county."

"Thanks, that sounds fine." Rick tried to stay polite and nondescript as the waitress cut him a slice and slid the plate across the counter.

"Coffee? We have decaf and regular."

With an impish grin, Rick said, "Regular. But only if it's a 'damn fine' cup of joe."

The girl twirled her hair flirtatiously, but the look on her face betrayed her confusion. "I'm sure it is. What's that supposed to mean, anyway?"

"Forget it," said Rick with a roll of his eyes. "Nobody watched that show anyway."

After that, the diner fell back into silence again. Rick ate the pie and drank the coffee—they were both actually pretty good—and observed the locals. A few of them sat around one of the booths by the window, conversing in low tones. Then came the phone ring. Rick swore—it was his own cell phone again. Once more, nearly everybody in the diner looked up to stare at the stranger.

Rick made an awkward apology for the sudden noise and pulled out his phone. He looked at the number: it was Tracey, finally getting back to him. "Oh, thank God," he said, answering it. "Hey, Trace!"

He was met with dead air.

"Tracey? Are you there? Can you hear me!?" There was no response; with growl of frustration, he hung up and waited. Half a minute later, there was another voice-mail: " _…God, what is up with the cell phone service out here? Ugh! Whatever… Rick! Honey! You're never gonna believe it! I got the part! I got the part! I'm just so—I can't believe it, I got the part! It—oh, God, I'm just—now, it does mean I'm gonna be out here for a little while longer than we thought. A few weeks, maybe a month. But—but—_ " Tracey interrupted her message with a squeal of delight, and it sounded like she was actually jumping up and down in place, " _I got my first part! I'm officially a working actress! Woo-hoo! … Call me! Miss you!_ " And that was that.

Rick did try calling her back right away, but she didn't pick up. Again. He slumped down onto the counter and let his face sink into his folded arms. He was happy for Tracey—of course he was—but this long-distance, every-phone-call-is-a-near-miss business was starting to wear _really_ thin. He was too tired and disappointed to try leaving another message this time; and he was honestly starting to wonder whether he wasn't just as cursed as Gus.

The waitress came up to the counter again and said, "What's the matter, hon? You look like someone just killed your cat."

"Actually," said Rick with self-conscious chuckle, "I just got a message from my fiancée. Says she might be out of town a month longer than she planned."

"Oh, you poor dear!" said the waitress. "So does that mean you're up here all by yourself, Mr…?"

"Carter. Rick Carter. And, yeah, it's just me."

"Crying shame. Jen Lawson," she added, introducing herself. "So, how long you planning on staying in Two Bears? Come up for the trout?"

"Er… I think I'll be here for a couple of days. Is there, like, a hotel or something in town?"

"Well," said Jen, "you can talk to the mayor about a cabin, or you can—"

"Pardon me," said an interrupting voice. Rick turned on the stool and saw that he'd been approached by a middle-aged woman, round in both face and physique, with graying ginger hair and a loose-fitting sundress. "Did I hear you're looking for accommodations? I'm Laurie Knox; I'm the mayor. I also rent out the lakeside cabins. Planning on staying through the summer, or…?"

"No," said Rick. "No, thanks, I'll just be here for a little while. So maybe something a bit more temporary?"

"As I was saying!" cut in Jen, who shot Mayor Knox a sharp look of reprimand, "Your other choice is to ask my dad. He lets out the rooms above his antique shop."

The mayor nodded. "Sure, sure, Mr. Lawson's place is a perfectly good choice. Kind of a B&B deal, he usually saves it for couples and tourists. But if you're planning on doing any fi—"

"I'm a tourist," said Rick, maybe a little too harshly. "Definitely _not_ interested in fishing."

"Well, I never," said the mayor.

Jen rolled her eyes. "Oh, don't judge the man, Laurie. He just got some bad news about his girl—"

Rick interrupted, "It wasn't _bad_ news; it's only—"

Jen cut him off right back. "Look, Mr. Carter, you go talk to my dad and tell him I sent you. He'll give you a deal on a room."

"Uh—sure, okay, said Rick. "Thanks." He threw a few bills and coins onto the counter, excused himself, and left the diner in a sour mood.

* * *

Rick strolled down the sidewalk with his hands jammed into his pockets. He had a lot on his mind, and it was making him grumpy. The drive up here from the city had given him plenty of time to mull everything over and let it all sink in. There was a secretive magical world out there, and he'd been given the opportunity to dip his toes in—but he still didn't know a whole lot about it. What was real, and what wasn't? Could he trust Mrs. Smith? If Gus came out of his coma soon like she predicted he would, that would go a long way in Rick's book. If he could finally have a real conversation with his fiancée, that would also make him feel better; but apparently that just wasn't in the cards anytime soon.

Oh, God: what was he actually going to tell Tracey about all of this? _Could_ he tell her? Or did his new job mean that he'd have to start keeping secrets? Maybe he should've gotten some clarification on that point before accepting.

Two men carrying fishing-poles walked past Rick, heading in the opposite direction up the sidewalk. "I don't get it," complained one of them to the other. "It's like the big ones aren't even biting this season. Wonder where they all went?"

Rick paid these men no heed and approached the building with painted signs that read "ANTIQUES" in large letters above the door and "Lawson's Bed & Breakfast" on a sandwich-board stand by the door-stoop. He pushed through the doorway, setting off a little bell that jingled overhead.

The antique shop was cluttered with all kinds of junk—mostly furniture and dusty old knick-knacks. A globe on a wooden stand, an old hurricane lamp, and a collection of bare dress-stands blocked off an empty fireplace; and over that hung a decorated shield with two Civil War era sabers crossed behind it. A shelf near the counter was brimming full with vases, kettles, teacups, and porcelain figurines. In another room behind the counter, Rick could see shelves and shelves of aged books. (He was immediately tempted to go check those out.) But there was, for the moment, nobody else here in the shop. Rick walked up to the counter and looked around for a bell or something that he could ring to call for service. Instead, the only objects on the counter were the cash register, a jar with penny-candy, and an odd looking little statuette.

Rick picked up the statue. It was a strange piece of work, some kind of dark lava-rock, carved to look like… something. An ocean wave, a couple of octopus tentacles, what looked like a lobster-claw, a mass of eyes. There were some Norse runes carved into the base of the statuette, but they were difficult to make out. Rick was about as conversant with runes as anyone else who'd grown up reading and re-reading _The Hobbit_ , so he squinted in the dim light and tried to read. "ᛞᚷᚾ"— _Dæġ, Ġifu, Nȳd._

"That's not for sale."

Rick looked up and saw that an old man was coming down the stars, silver-haired and bespectacled. He was wearing brown slacks and an argyle vest, and he leaned on a cane. "Sorry," said Rick, putting down the statue. "I didn't know."

The old man moved behind the counter and picked up the queer object. "I wonder how this old thing got left out? Don't worry about it, stranger. My mistake." With that, he squirreled the statue away in a small lockbox concealed behind the counter. "Now, what can I do for you?"

"The name's Carter. Rick Carter. I need a room for a couple days. The waitress at the diner, Jen, she sent me here."

"Good girl," smiled the man. "I'm John Lawson. I've got the best rooms in town, if you're interested." He quoted a price, and Rick quickly agreed. "Well then, here you are," said Mr. Lawson, handing Rick a key. "Your room's on the third floor. If you don't mind me asking, what are your plans while you stay here in Two Bears?"

"Just a little bit of sightseeing," said Rick.

"Well, if you happen to head down to the lake, be careful."

"Careful? What for?"

Mr. Lawson looked Rick in the eye and pronounced solemnly, "Water safety's important. We don't want any boating accidents, do we?"

"No. No we don't." Rick moved toward the door of the shop. "I… just need to get my bags. I'll be back to take a look at the room in a few."

"Take your time," said Mr. Lawson, his demeanor suddenly friendly again. "I hope your stay here is comfortable!"

Rick scurried out the door quickly.

* * *

Rick took the rest of the evening to get settled in his room above Mr. Lawson's antique shop and wander for bit around the tiny excuse of a town. It was unsettling to realize just how isolated this place was. The fact that it seemed nearly deserted at times didn't help. And, to make matters worse, Rick realized as he walked up and down the lone street that cell phone reception was dodgy at best. He had to fight for one bar worth of signal service, and even then, try as he might, he couldn't get a call out to L.A. Well, that explained why he hadn't been able to get in touch with Tracey back at the diner. Regardless, Rick was in no mood to get to work that evening.

So he waited for the following day. He got up the next morning after a restless, perturbed sleep. The diner up the main drag seemed to be the only place in town where people gathered together socially. That was as good a place as any to start his search.

He crossed the road, slipped into the diner, and sat down at a booth. Sure enough, Jen was on duty again this morning, chipper as you please and waiting for Rick with a flirty smile. "Hey, stranger! How'd you sleep?" She snatched up a pad and pen and went over to the booth to take his order.

Rick just gave a noncommittal shrug before glancing at the menu and requesting eggs and toast. "So…" he started, thinking to open a conversation with the waitress. But he was interrupted again.

"Jenny!" came a shout from the corner of the dining room. Rick sat up a little straighter in his seat to catch a glimpse of who it was. The man who'd called was dark-haired, handsome, impeccably groomed, and wearing the brown uniform of a sheriff. He was motioning to the waitress with one hand and holding an empty coffee cup with the other.

"I'll be right back with your breakfast," said Jen quietly to Rick. "Don't you move, cutie."

Rick leaned back in his seat and watched the waitress sashay away. He gave a low whistle under his breath. She certainly was forward for a small-town girl—and one who knew that he was engaged, at that.

A few minutes later, Jen came back as promised with a piping hot plate of food and a fresh pot of coffee. Rick figured that now was his chance to try again. "So—"

"If you're trying to ask whether I ever get off work, I'm free after three o'clock today," said Jen with a wink.

Rick almost choked on his scrambled eggs. "Ahem—um—that's good to know," he said between coughs. "Actually, uh, I just wanted to ask you a few questions. I heard that some people up here, well, that they went missing around the lake, and I was hoping—"

"Oh," said Jen, looking down at her apron in disappointment. "That's… I don't really know anything about that." She looked over her shoulder and shouted in the direction of the sheriff, "Hey, Donnie! Carter here is asking about the missing persons!"

With the precision of a soldier, the officer rose stiffly from his table and crossed the room. He stood next to Jen and looked down at Rick. "I'm Sheriff Carlson," he said by way of introduction. "What exactly is your interest in the disappearances, sir?"

Rick tried his best to look casual, sipping his coffee as he pulled from his back pocket the new wallet he'd been given by Mrs. Smith. He flipped this open and threw it down onto the table.

The sheriff picked up the wallet, glanced at the ID, and then regarded Rick with a raised eyebrow. "You're a private eye?"

"That's right," said Rick. "I'm not looking to cause trouble here, Marshall. Just nosing around."

"Sheriff," came the predictable correction. "Mind if I ask who hired you, Mr. Carter?"

"That's… confidential," said Rick. "Company policy. I'm sure you understand."

"Of course," said Sheriff Carlson. "And I'm sure you'll understand that my investigation is still ongoing, so I can't share information with some out-of-town private dick. I'm afraid there won't be much for you to do here, detective. Sorry I couldn't be more helpful." The sheriff then turned to Jen and gave her a look—Rick could only describe it as "the stink-eye"—before he excused himself and left the diner in a hurry.

Rick looked up at the waitress and asked, "Is he always like that?"

"Who, Donnie? Yeah, pretty much." Jen sat down in the booth across from Rick—they were now the only two people in the diner—and sighed. "Shame, too. He was a nice guy before he got the badge."

Rick absently poked his fork at the food on his plate. After a beat, he asked, "Are you sure there's nothing you can tell me about the people who've gone missing? I mean, this town is so small, you must've known them, right?"

Jen frowned and nodded. "It's been four people in the last month. Mr. and Mrs. Leibowitz—they ran the schoolhouse. They just up and vanished one night. There was Bobby Teeger, old Jack Teeger's son, who went out on the lake and didn't come back. And Zeke Carlson."

"Carlson?"

"Donnie's brother. Ran the sporting goods store. Sold rods and lures mostly. Come to think of it, he was last seen down by the lakeside too."

Rick nodded and said sincerely, "Thanks, Jen. That's really helpful."

Jen looked Rick squarely in the eye and asked, "Is that why you're here? To figure out what happened to those people?"

"Yeah, pretty much."

"In that case… best of luck, Mr. Carter. Hey, let me get you some more coffee."

* * *

There were no two ways about it: something fishy was going on in Two Bears Lake, and it didn't have anything to do with trout. While it was still morning, Rick decided to get an early start on his work. After all, the sooner he solved this little mystery, the sooner he could get back to civilization. Maybe then he could check up on Gus and perhaps even get a phone call through to Tracey. With those hopes in mind, he decided to do what he did best: tech-work. This private eye shtick, with the snooping around and interrogating people, wasn't exactly his forte. His gadgets, on the other hand, were much easier to read than people. Of course they were; he'd designed them that way.

Rick drove the van down to the shore of the lake. He opened the back and started taking out his gear. First he pulled out the portable generator and battery pack; then he set to work raising his sensors on stands and tripods and pointing them at the water.

A low whistle sounded behind Rick. "Hoo-wee, stranger! What's that getup s'posed to be, some kind of fancy fish-finder radar?" Rick turned and saw a man approaching, middle-aged and overweight, most of his face hidden behind a walrus-like moustache.

People around here sure like to sneak up on a guy, Rick thought to himself. "Uh… yeah, sure. Something like that. And you are?"

"Name's Jack Teeger. I own the boathouse up the shoreline yonder."

On hearing that name, Rick looked up at this man and stared. He seemed mighty friendly for someone whose kid had lately disappeared without a trace. "Teeger?" repeated Rick. "I just heard about your son. I'm sorry."

Jack Teeger's face was suddenly clouded by gloom. "Heard about that, did you?"

Rick nodded. "And maybe, if you want to stick around for a bit, you can watch me get to the bottom of it."

Teeger looked suspiciously at Rick's eclectic assortment of gear, all the gadgets and panels and laptop computers. "I take it this stuff isn't a fish radar after all, then?"

"Not exactly," admitted Rick. "You could have Nessie sleeping in your lake, and these sensors couldn't tell us. But there might be something else…" Rick switched on all the scopes and started sweeping for thermals, emanations, and valences. He'd certainly done this sort of thing enough with Gus to know by now what to look for. Unusual temperature variations and weird electromagnetic fields were supposedly a sure sign of paranormal activity. Likewise for unexplained patterns that the computer picked up across all the spectra, especially microwave and radio. "Hello, Dolly," said Rick. "We've got a twitch… but it's small."

"What's small?" asked Teeger, more confused than curious.

"The sensor reading. Whatever it is, it's far from shore. I think… I think I need to go out on the lake." Rick cast a sidelong glance at the boatman and asked wryly, "Hey, you wouldn't happen to know where I can rent a boat?"

Jack Teeger looked a little dumbfounded as he stared at Rick, but he quickly gathered his wits at the scent of a business opportunity. "As a matter of fact, mister, this could be your lucky day."

* * *

Rick didn't know much about boats, but he was pretty sure Jack Teeger's rental dinghy was the least seaworthy deathtrap in the northeastern United States. Unfortunately, it was also the one and only overpriced rust-bucket available. After a brief lesson in how to steer an outboard motor, Rick found himself waving goodbye to Mr. Teeger and dry land, the dinghy weighted down with some of Rick's more sensitive scanners.

It was midday now, and the sun was high in the sky. With nary a cloud to provide shade, the heat was already oppressive. The lake wasn't exactly still, and every ripple seemed to reflect a blinding glare. Rick made a point of taking it slow, both because he wasn't all that sure-handed yet at the till of a boat, and because he didn't want to risk sloshing lake-water onto his equipment.

Rick piloted the dinghy straight out into the lake, driving the boat until he guessed that he was about halfway across. Then he cut the engine and carefully stood up. Turning all the way around (while making sure to keep his footing), he figured that this was about as close to the middle of Two Bears Lake as he could hope to get. With that, he sat down again, booted up the one laptop he'd brought, and started recalibrating the sensors. Once that was done, all he had to do was wait for the software to finish a full sweep. There was really no telling how long that would take, so Rick programmed his computer to sound an alarm when it was finished. Then, thinking to get out of the sun, he pulled a tarp out from under the pilot's seat, lay down in the bottom of the boat, and let himself doze off…

* * *

It was nearly an hour later when Rick's laptop let out a whoop and holler. Rick shot up, still under the tarp, and looked around underneath it in surprise. Then, pulling off the offending cloth, he scrambled over to his computer and shut off the repetitious alarm-beeps. He looked up at the sky: the sun was only just starting to descend. It was still unbearably warm out over the lake. Rick squinted at his computer screen and tried to assimilate the data that it was showing him. Every single program that he'd devised to help Gus with his investigations was saying that, yes, there was some kind of paranormal presence within the range of the sensor-scopes. But beyond that, there wasn't much more that could be gleaned from the readouts. Rick sighed and snapped his laptop shut in frustration. This was a useless exercise, he thought. The next step—it made him groan inside to think about it—would have to be to rustle up some diving gear and actually search under the surface of the lake itself.

Rick was getting annoyed with this whole situation. Just what did Mrs. Smith expect him to do, anyway? What if it was some kind of lake monster, snatching people who got too close to the water? Rick shook his head. That was a ridiculous thought. Then, as he reached over to the motor and made ready to start it up again, something ran into the underside of the boat. There was an audible "thump," and the dinghy suddenly rocked violently from side to side. Rick had to grab the gunwale to keep from pitching headlong overboard.

"Oh my God!" he realized. "Lake monster!" Abjectly afraid, Rick scrambled for one of the emergency oars that rested in the bottom of the dinghy, just in case the motor failed. He picked this up and held it like a club, looking every which way for any sign of something visible through the water.

Everything was still again. Cautiously, Rick stood up and peered out over the lake. Then, in a flash, he saw… something. A shimmer of sunlight glinting off a silvery surface that shot through the water like a torpedo, only a few feet down. Rick was taken aback with surprise, and he gasped when he finally saw the fin: more than a yard wide, it broke the surface of the lake and struck hard on the side of his boat. He fell backwards and landed on the floor of the dinghy. A wave splashed over the gunwale and drenched him completely. Rick sputtered and pulled himself upright again. Forgetting the oar, he took firm hold of the boat to steady himself and looked out at the water again.

Just under the surface, circling the boat like a shark, was a shadowy form. It was big—really big, at least nine feet long, maybe ten. Scales reflected the bright sunlight, making it hard to discern the creature's shape. But there were definitely fins and—Rick gulped—arms or maybe tentacles. Whatever that thing was, it was sure as hell no lake trout.

Rick scrambled for the outboard motor, yanked the cord until it started up, and took firm hold of the till. He wasn't about to let himself become monster-chow, not now that he'd actually seen it with his own eyes. As the dinghy sped for shore, he only spared a short glance over his shoulder; but as far as he could tell, nothing seemed to be following behind him.

Whatever that creature was, he'd escaped from it for now.

* * *

Rick threw open the diner door and swaggered in. All at once, every eye in the restaurant was upon him. Rick looked around and saw that Jen and John Lawson were talking to each other from opposite sides of the counter; Sheriff Carlson sat at a booth talking to Mayor Knox and Jack Teeger; and there were ten other folks in the diner, some sitting alone and some in small groups. The place was as packed as Rick had seen it yet.

Rick swallowed and crossed over to the counter, taking a seat next to Mr. Lawson. Jen looked like she wanted to say something, but her father cast a look her way that made the young woman shuffle off in silence.

"I don't even get a menu?" quipped Rick.

Lawson turned to Rick and said, "Mr. Teeger here tells us that you went out on the lake a little bit ago with some kind of… instruments, he called them."

"Scientific apparatus," Rick offered helpfully.

The firm footfalls that clicked on the diner floor told Rick that the sheriff was coming up behind him. "And what exactly do you think you'll find with your… apparatus, Mr. Carter?" asked Carlson.

Rick shrugged. "I don't quite know yet." Raising his voice so that everyone in the diner could hear him clearly, he continued, "But anything you fine folks can tell me would be much appreciated. So, how about it? Has anyone seen anything… unusual down by the lake? Any strange sightings? Unexplained phenomena?"

"Phenomena?" echoed Jack Teeger from the booth by the window. "You think there's some kind of… 'phenomena' that's making people vanish?"

Rick spun around in his stool and looked Teeger in the eye. "You tell me. Anything you've seen, anything out of the ordinary? I'd appreciate it."

Rick once again looked at every face in the diner, but they all stared back blankly. Nobody moved or spoke up. Sheriff Carlson finally put it into words: "No. There's nothing like that going on here."

"Then how do you explain four people, gone missing without a trace?" asked Rick.

"I already told you, Carter: ongoing investigation. I can't discuss details with a civilian. It's against the law."

"Right," said Rick. With that, he stood up angrily, glared at the sheriff (who didn't flinch at all), and stormed out the door.

Even after he left the diner, nobody spoke.

* * *

Rick spent the rest of the evening wandering around the town, racking his brains, trying to decide on his next move. The townsfolk were stonewalling him, that much was certain. He just couldn't figure out why. Why didn't they want him getting to the bottom of this mystery? They were the ones in danger here! Maybe, Rick speculated, they were worried that if word got out, it would hurt their tourism industry. They seemed to rely on a steady inflow of fishermen for their economy. That was just about the only plausible answer that Rick could come up with, though, and it still didn't quite make sense to him.

No. If Rick was going to find a solution to this problem, he would have to play to his strengths. He might not have been cut out for detective work, but he was a damned good engineer. There had to be something he could cobble together to track the creature underwater. A sonar device, maybe? Surely somebody in this podunk town must have owned a fish-detector. Maybe he could disassemble one of his other gadgets for spare parts and MacGyver together an upgrade to make the commercial scanner more effective?

It was nearly sundown when Rick finally arrived at this decision, and as he looked around, he realized that he'd wandered almost all the way down to the lake again. With the sun low in the sky, it cast an orange sheen over the water. Rick strode past the small collection of empty cabins and stood on the shore, looking out. "Gus, buddy, if only you were here," he said under his breath, "you'd probably already have this all figured out."

That was when Rick heard a twig snap in the distance, and he saw a bit of movement out the corner of his eye. It was getting darker now, but Rick peered through the pines and tried to see what exactly it was, a ways up the shoreline. Somebody was nearby, walking through the woods, maybe toward the lake's western bank. Crouching low, Rick hugged the shore and crept after the not-too-distant figure.

Pushing his way past some bushes, Rick came to a spot where the land jutted out into the lake. A tiny shed stood between a couple of fir trees, and past that, a pier stretched even farther out into the water. Rick could just barely make out the sight of Laurie Knox, holding something small and metallic, walking out to the edge of the pier. _What in the world,_ Rick thought, _could she possibly be doing?_ He knew, in that instant, that he would have to get closer.

Careful not to step on any branches or leaves, Rick crept out of the bushes and made his way down the slope. All the while, he kept his eyes firmly fixed on Mayor Knox. She was standing motionless at the very edge of the pier now, apparently just waiting for something to happen. Rick managed to get all the way down to the shoreline again without making too much noise. Stooping down, he practically crawled across the stretch of open space and then concealed himself behind the little wooden shack. Still the mayor waited.

Then something perfectly bizarre happened. Rick heard a strange noise, almost like music, a queer sort of wordless warbling. It was almost like a song, but the voice was positively unearthly. Rick was convinced that this sound, whatever it was, wasn't natural. As for Mayor Knox, she seemed hypnotized by the echoing strains. She gazed intently out over the lake, and then, seeming to spot something, she raised up one hand. Rick saw the small metal object glint in the fading light of the early evening. The mayor tensed, as if she were getting ready to pounce on something… when, without warning, a column of water rose up out of the lake, splashing the mayor and soaking her from head to toe. She gasped and flailed about, but it was to no avail. Rick saw something rise up out of the water and slither onto the pier. He watched, trying to make out what it was, but fear had him fixed firmly in place. His voice caught in his throat. He couldn't move, he couldn't cry out, not even when the creature wrapped its arms—two pale, very humanlike arms—around the mayor and suddenly dragged her down into the lake. Laurie Knox and the creature both slid off the pier and into the water, barely making a ripple on the surface as they disappeared. Something clattered down onto the planks of the dock, leaving it the only sign that the mayor of the town had stood there mere moments ago.

 _Holy. Fucking. Shit._ Those three words cycled endlessly through Rick's mind. He breathed heavily and fought to calm himself, to get a grip and gather his wits. He needed to get control of himself, right now. The mayor might already be dead. Still half in a stupor, Rick jogged out from his hiding place and crept down the pier. Looking out over the water, he was certain that nobody would ever see Mayor Knox again. There was just no sign of her… except for a hint of something silvery on the pier's end. Rick knelt down and picked it up. It was a dagger. A dagger with a bloodstain on the blade.

Green blood.

The mayor had come down to the dock to… what, exactly? Fight the monster? Kill it? Rick couldn't say. Taking out a handkerchief, Rick carefully scooped up the dagger and wrapped it in the cloth, taking care not to smear the unusual blood too much.

Rick thought back to this latest glimpse of the creature. It had climbed out of the water, taken hold of a relatively large woman, and dragged her under the lake without much effort at all—apparently suffering a stab-wound in the process, and that hadn't even slowed it down. Rick suppressed a shudder of horror. This weird situation had just gotten a whole lot weirder—and a whole lot more dangerous.

One thing was certain, though: it was life and death now, and Rick's was the life on the line. He was through playing games with a town full of reluctant rednecks. It was definitely time to get some answers.

* * *

Stunned by what he'd just witnessed and scared half out of his mind, Rick wandered back into town. It was dark now, but not so dark that he couldn't see his way. Only a few windows had lights shining in them, and the street was empty of activity. Two Bears Lake was altogether quiet. He looked up at the night sky. If it weren't for the moon, almost full and shining brightly, he would've been able to see a brilliant panorama of stars this far out into the countryside.

His first instinct was to go find Sheriff Carlson. Sure, the guy was a colossal tool on top of being a tinpot authoritarian, but he was still the law around here. Rick was pretty sure that'd just seen Mayor Knox being abducted, probably murdered, possibly eaten. You just _had_ to go to the proper authorities when you saw something like that; right?

He came to a sudden stop outside of the sheriff's office (which was easy enough to locate on the small town's main drag). A bothersome thought had just occurred to him: was the sheriff the "proper" authority in this situation; or was Rick? Wasn't it half of an Agency operative's job-description to keep supernatural stuff like this under wraps and a secret from the general public? Frustrated, he growled several angry curses under his breath and tried to clear his head, to put himself in a mental place where he could make a decision. He didn't know what to do; he didn't know what he was _supposed_ to do.

Then again, maybe the decision had already been made for him. The sheriff's office was dark and apparently empty. Rick tried the front door; it was locked. He rapped on the window; no response. Underneath the six-pointed star-emblem painted on the office's front window, there was a phone number. He took out his cell phone—the signal-indicator was flickering between one bar of service and none—and tried the number. The call was garbled and staticky, but it went through: Rick heard ringing. At the very same time, he also heard the sound of an actual _landline telephone_ ringing somewhere inside the sheriff's office, at least until the call went to an answering machine.

Rick hung up without bothering to leave a message. He didn't see a point. Even if he _could_ manage to get in touch with Sheriff Carlson, what could the sheriff possibly do? It wasn't as if he could arrest the lake-monster.

It wasn't as if he could save Mayor Knox.

"Fucking _crap_ ," Rick muttered with a heavy sigh. He wasn't going to accomplish anything more tonight.

He crossed over to the antique shop, made his way softly up to the third-floor room, and collapsed onto the quilt-covered bed. Once again, sleep came fitfully and with difficulty. At some point during the night, Rick was positive that he heard something in the distance, faint but just loud enough to carry throughout the town. Singing? No; it was more like… chanting. Rhythmic and repetitious. Deep. Powerful. It ended on a yell, a kind of joyous whoop uttered by many voices. Rick's eyes snapped open at that.

He was still lying on the bed, above the covers. When had he dozed off? He checked his phone. It was one in the morning. So it had been a few hours, then.

He sat up and walked over to the window. From here, he could see the street, the buildings across the way, the diner. Practically the whole town. Everything was quiet. Perfectly still. Eerily tranquil, even.

Unsettled, Rick disrobed and went back to bed. This time, he fell asleep right away.

* * *

The next morning, Rick was determined. He took up the bloody dagger, still wrapped in cloth, and went downstairs. Old Mr. Lawson was up and about, sweeping the storefront. He spotted Rick and offered a polite nod. "Morning, Mr. Carter. Rough night?"

"Rough week." Rick walked past the shopkeeper and out into the street. Then, on a second thought, he turned and said, "You might want to stop by the diner sometime this morning. Things are getting interesting."

Lawson looked at the stranger oddly. "I'll keep that in mind."

Rick nodded, turned, and crossed the street. He marched up to the diner, ambled in, and took a spot at the counter. A brief glance around the joint revealed only one other occupant: Sheriff Carlson, sitting at his usual table in the corner nearest the restroom door. The swinging door from the kitchen opened, and out came a heavyset woman in her late thirties, bright red hair (an obvious dye-job) done up in a beehive and held in place by a hairnet. Without looking up from the counter or bothering to meet Rick's eyes, she set out a coffee cup, filled it (from the orange-rimmed decaf pot, Rick noted), and said in a bored voice while chewing gum, "I'm Millie, I'll be your server this morning, what can I get'cha?"

"Millie, as in Millie's Diner?" asked Rick.

"The one and only, hon."

"Where's Jen?"

"Day off." Now she was interested enough to look up and take measure of Rick. "Say, you're the stranger she was going on about. The detective, right?"

"Right. I'll go with… the cherry pie."

"It's peach today, hon. That okay with you?"

Rick nodded absently, already distracted with thoughts of what he was about to say. He looked around the diner again. The sheriff glanced up at Rick for just an instant, but he made no move to get up or say hello. Rick nervously bit his bottom lip and sipped his coffee. Now it was just a matter of waiting.

* * *

There were already a dozen people gathered in the diner, but Rick chose to avoid making a scene until Jen Lawson and her father showed up and sat down for breakfast. It was kind of strange to see Jen in off-duty clothes. She looked downright hot in daisy dukes and a tank-top. Rick grumbled and silently chastised himself for his wandering thoughts. It was time to play Sherlock Holmes; and there was a very good chance that this could all go pear-shaped quickly.

He turned around, stood up, and cleared his throat loudly enough to draw everyone's attention. "Excuse me. Heya, folks—excuse me. Since everybody's here: the detective has some questions."

Jen asked Rick, "What's going on?"

"In a minute," said Rick. He addressed Sheriff Carlson and said, "First off, I'd like to know, where were you last night, just after sundown?"

The sheriff took his time answering. He set down his knife and fork, picked up a napkin, and slowly wiped his mouth. At last, he replied, "On a call. Had to put down a rabid animal, on a farm a couple hours' drive out of town."

"Great," said Rick with a nod. "That's fantastic. Because while you were out plugging Old Yeller, I saw _something_ —I don't know what—pull Mayor Knox into the lake."

Now that caused a commotion. Half the people jumped up from their seats, and they probably would've started shouting questions and crowding Rick if the sheriff hadn't also been there. When Sheriff Carlson stood up, everybody else fell silent and made way for him to pass. He marched over to Rick and asked, "Are you telling us that the mayor is—what, dead? Drowned?"

Rick met the sheriff's withering gaze with a hardened look of his own. "All I know is, I saw her go under the water, and I didn't see her come back up."

All eyes in the diner were fixed on the two men and their staring contest. "You have proof?" asked Carlson.

"Not as much as I'd like," admitted Rick. "But let me ask: has anybody here seen Laurie Knox alive since last night?"

A few brief, whispered conversations ensued. Eventually, Jack Teeger raised his hand. He timidly admitted, "I saw Laurie about a half an hour before sundown. She looked… pretty worried. Said she had something important to take care of."

"Did she say what it was?" asked Rick. Teeger only shook his head, so Rick continued, "Well, that's okay. I have a pretty good idea what it was." With that, he took out the cloth-wrapped dagger and set the parcel down on the counter. "Last night, right about sundown, I saw Mayor Knox walking down to the lake. She was headed for the old dock just west of the boathouse. You guys all know where I'm talking about?" Rick was answered by nodding heads from most of the folks in attendance. He pointed to the wrapped cloth and said, "She was carrying this knife with her. I saw her walk to the end of the dock and wait. A bit later, some kind of… creature… it came up out of the water. They fought. Then it took hold of Laurie and pulled her in. I didn't see her again." To emphasize the point, Rick lifted the cloth off the knife. The bright blue-green bloodstain was still visible. "Ladies and gentlemen of Two Bears… your mayor is dead, and you've got a _critter_ problem in your lake."

Most of the people in the diner just stared at the bloody knife in shock, but Sheriff Carlson slammed his fist down on the counter, hard enough to make all the plates rattle. "That's enough!" he shouted. "Mister, I think we've had just about all we're going to take with your—your—big-city bullshit!"

Rick's jaw dropped. "Are you kidding me? Look at that," he said, pointing at the knife again. "I don't know what it came from, but it sure as hell isn't anything natural! That's not food coloring, Sheriff! This thing is picking you people off one by one, and I seem to be the only one here who wants to do anything about it!"

At that point, Mr. Lawson stood up. The sheriff asked him, "Where are you going, John?"

"To get a brush and some paint," answered the old man. "It looks like we have to change the sign again. Two Bears Lake… population, forty-one."

The sheriff looked around at all the faces in the diner. The people were obviously frightened. Jen and Mr. Teeger looked especially distressed. With a sniff, he turned back to Rick and said, "All right, Carter, let's say I believe you. What do you think we should do about this… lake-critter?"

"Yes!" said Rick, clapping his hands and rubbing them together. "Now we're talking! Let's get down to brass tacks. First off, I'm going to need some kind of sonar. Even a fish-finder should work, as long as—"

"Whoa there," said the sheriff. "Hold it, stranger. I just asked for your advice. Doesn't mean I want your help."

Rick froze, now more than a little pissed off. "What…?"

"Here's what's going to happen," continued Carlson, taking out his gun. It was a very large, very shiny magnum revolver. As he spoke, he opened the drum and checked to make sure that it was still fully loaded. "You are going to leave town. Right now. You pack your crap, and you get out of Two Bears. And you leave the thing in the lake to me."

"Oh, no," said Rick, shaking his head. "You can't just run me out of town! If I don't want to go, what are you going to do? Shoot me?"

"Maybe just!" the sheriff snapped.

"Hell no!" retorted Rick. "I'll be damned if I go anywhere before I've gotten to the bottom of this case!" He turned to the others in the diner to appeal for some backup. "Come on! You all know I can help you. Come on… Jen…?"

Rick was shocked to see that Jen had a pained look on her face. She was staring back at him in… sorrow? Anger? At any rate, she was on the verge of tears. "Just… do what Donnie says," she whispered. "Go. Leave town."

But Rick was determined. He shook his head. "Not until I've gotten some Goddamned answers." With that, he scooped up the green-stained knife, pushed his way past Sheriff Carlson, and stomped out of the diner.

* * *

Later that morning, Rick was still stewing with anger. Not one person in town was willing to lift a finger to help him. He asked everybody he saw where he could find the parts that he needed to make a sonar scanner, but it was useless. People were reluctant to even talk to him. They treated him like a plague victim. At one point, he saw Jen walking down the street and jogged to catch up with her.

"Hey! Where're you headed?"

"Dad's shop."

"Fancy that," said Rick. "Me too. By the way, I could've used some support back there. At Millie's this morning, I mean. So, you know, thanks for taking my side."

Jen sniffed and said, "I don't know. I think you proved to everybody that you'd rather take care of yourself."

Rick stopped in his tracks. What in the hell was that supposed to mean?

Jen just kept on walking and disappeared into the antique shop.

With a heavy sigh of resignation, Rick realized that he was truly on his own. Well, maybe there were parts enough in the van to jury-rig something useful. But damned if it wasn't going to take all day to do the job. "Join the Faircourt Agency, Rick!" he muttered to himself in a mocking voice. "Magic! Excitement! Monsters that want to eat your face off! It's anyone's dream-job!" He turned around and shuffled off in the direction of his parked van, shaking his head the whole way. "Agency, my ass."

* * *

It took Rick the entire afternoon to jimmy up a scanner that would—theoretically—track in real time the underwater movements of a large aquatic creature from the surface. He spent the rest of the evening putting the finishing touches on the interface mechanisms and tweaking some of the firmware until it looked like everything would work to his specifications. In short, he spent the whole day in his room at the hostelry above Lawson's antique store, cutting and soldering and writing code, generally doing the engineer thing. By the time his nifty new widget was finished, it was already after sundown.

Rick looked over at the window and noticed for the first time how late it was. He yawned and put away his tools. It was too dark to try the lake tonight, but at least now he had some tech all ready to go. "Catch you in the morning, monster," said Rick with a smirk. Then he went to bed.

* * *

It was Rick's third night at the B&B, and yet again he had trouble getting to sleep. It was an odd, unsettling feeling, like a low vibration that thrummed through the bed, the floor, the walls, and kept Rick tossing and turning as the minutes ticked slowly by. Eventually, he couldn't take it anymore. Throwing off the covers, he clambered out of bed and threw open the window.

There it was again—the weird, low-pitched rhythm. Rick strained his ears. They were definitely voices, chanting in harmony. It was some distance away, but not so far away that he couldn't make it out. He looked up at the sky—the moon was still bright and waxing gibbous, only a couple of days away from being full. The hour… Rick checked his phone and saw that it was just about midnight.

Well, this wasn't a happenstance that Rick was about let slip by twice. Something was going on, and he was bound and determined to figure out what. Throwing on some clothes, he crept down the stairs and went out into the night.

* * *

The air was cold for a night in the summertime. Rick shivered a bit and rubbed his arms. The voices were coming from the woods. He didn't want to risk being seen, so he had to make do without a light. Given that fact, it was fortunate that the moon was so bright and the sky was still cloudless. All things considered, Rick had little trouble picking his way through the pine trees by the silvery moonshine.

The chanting grew louder, and as it did, Rick could start to make out words. It wasn't a language he could understand, but nevertheless it sent shivers down his spine.

" _Y'ha-nthlei… Y'ha-nthlei… Sph'pngui bglw'nyfh Y'ha-nthlei rgwh'matl fhtagn… Dagon blib'dulplbp fhtagn!_ "

The more Rick heard, the more he couldn't believe it. "Gotta be freaking kidding me…" he whispered. But then, after redcaps and elves, could he really be surprised that he seemed to be marching headlong into an H.P. Lovecraft novel? Apparently not. Right about then, he really wished that this place had turned out to be more like _Deliverance_ after all. Compared to this prehistoric chanting, "Dueling Banjos" would've been an absolute comfort.

Rick dropped to his hands and knees when the chanting seemed to reach a crescendo. Up ahead, he could see firelight between the trees. He crawled forward and parted some bushes, revealing a clearing. In this clearing, a bonfire had been built. It was bright enough to illuminate the whole area, although it seemed to cast a devilish glow over everything. A small stone altar stood next to the bonfire, and atop the altar was a smaller object made of darker stone: an idol or statuette. But, most disturbingly, the clearing was full of people—lots of people, all of them wearing black robes with cowls pulled down low over their faces. Rick tried to count them, and a lump formed in his throat when he realized that there were at least three dozen people in the clearing. _Sweet jumping Jesus,_ he thought with dread. _It's the whole motherfucking town._

At this point, Rick was finally cowed into giving up. There was no good way to deal with this situation on his own. He certainly wasn't about to confront a whole town full of whack-job cultists. He calculated that his best bet at this point would be to get in touch with Mrs. Smith, which meant making his way back to the town's main strip, back to where the van was parked. (Stashed within the van's glove-box was a small crystal ball, a standard piece of an Agency operative's field-kit.) Slowly, carefully, he let his hands off the bushes and let the foliage slide back into place. He took a single step back—which loudly snapped a dry branch in half—and Rick felt his heart leap into his neck. _Aw crap,_ he thought. He drew a ragged breath and tried to calm himself. Maybe nobody had heard him.

A shout from the clearing proved Rick wrong. "Intruder!" said a voice that sounded entirely too much like Mr. Lawson. "We've got a stranger nearby!"

"Aw crap, crap, crap, crap, crap," whispered Rick. Already, he could hear the townsfolk forming into a mob. Some of them picked up torches and lit them from the bonfire. That was it: all pretense of stealth was now officially over and done with. Turning tail, Rick took off into the woods as fast as he dared to run.

* * *

He must have gotten turned around somewhere, because he ran and ran, and still he saw nothing ahead but pine-boughs. The needles and low-hanging branches whipped his face as he sped through the woods, but Rick paid them no mind. He just kept running. Behind him, he could hear the mob getting closer. He risked a look over his shoulder and saw the glint of bobbing firelight as the torch-bearers ran after him in hot pursuit. Rick heaved and gasped and tried with difficulty to ignore the stitch forming in his side. He just fled for his life.

At one point, his foot clipped a root, which caused Rick to stumble. He caught himself before he could fall, though, and just kept right on running. The voices and footfalls behind him were gaining ground. Then, of a sudden, Rick burst through the treeline—and he realized just how badly he'd miscalculated. It wasn't the town that sat before him; it was the lake. He'd gone off in the wrong direction entirely, and now he found himself caught between the proverbial rock and hard place. The frying pan and the fire. The monster-infested lake and the crowd of loony-tunes insane, nutty nut-bars. Rick stood fast and swallowed. Okay; so his choice was between the lake-creature that grabbed people and drowned them, and a bunch of robed cultists who, earlier that morning, had politely asked him to leave town. Well, that wasn't much of a choice at all, now was it? Rick turned around and decided to face the music. Maybe the townsfolk would be nice and let him go if he promised to never, ever come back.

That was when Rick heard the water ripple and splash. Beyond terrified, he was certain that this was the end. He was a dead man where he stood. He closed his eyes and wondered how it had come to this. He heard the "squish" of something darting out of the water and onto the muddy bank behind him, and before he could react, a pair of wet, slimy arms had wrapped themselves around his body. He was jerked back violently, plunged into the lake, and borne under the water by something too strong to struggle with.

In the darkness and the depths, Rick couldn't see. He could just barely make out the moonlight shining on the lake's surface above, fading as he was drawn down. He felt the arms tugging him through the water… he felt some kind of slick, scaly thing, snaking its way around his legs… and eventually, he lost the struggle to hold his breath and slipped into unconsciousness.

* * *

It was still nighttime when Rick gasped, sputtered up a mouthful of lake-water, and came to. The moon was still shining overhead, but it was lower in the sky now, closer to the treetops. Rick sat up and looked around, thoroughly baffled. He was alive! He was sitting on the muddy shoreline, next to the lake—and the town! The cabins, the brick street, they were only few yards off from here. But what about the villagers? Rick scrambled to his feet. He was still soaking wet and caked with mud, but the more he breathed in the cool night air, the better he felt. A shake of his head cleared some of the cobwebs. The lake-creature; it had definitely snatched him, pulled him into the water… and away from the mob of people? Rick looked around, but it was all quiet again. The town was just as still and empty as it ever looked. There was nobody here. Which meant that Rick was home free! If he could just get to the van, he could be gone from this awful place in minutes.

Then, out of the corner of his eye, Rick saw something silvery shimmering on the lake. He heard a "plunk" in the water. Something was coming towards him. Surprised, Rick fell backwards and landed on the muddy bank again. A head was emerging from the lake. Rick could see it clearly in the moonlight: it was a girl. A beautiful girl.

Her face was lovely, almost indescribably so. The skin on her bare shoulders was fair and flawless, though pale enough to appear almost light gray in the moonlight. Wet, dark hair—it was green, vaguely the color of seaweed—clung to her body as she rose from the water. And she wore not one scrap of clothing, which meant that her hair was the only thing covering her decidedly perfect bosom.

Rick's jaw could have hit the ground. He just gaped and tried to speak. "Who—wha—huh?"

The lady in the lake then spoke: "I made sure to let them see me, but they didn't see you. You're safe while they circle the lake and search for me, but soon enough they'll come back." Her voice was soft and melodic, like the sirens of legend, with a Celtic-sounding brogue that Rick couldn't quite place. "Go. Quickly. You mustn't let them know that you've been outside this night."

Rick shook his head. "I… I don't understand…"

"Then come down to the water," said the mysterious lady. "I can show you the truth."

Rick hesitated. He knew his folklore: water fae were uniformly _fucking terrifying_ in the old stories. If one of them was showing you her pretty face, it was probably a ruse to lure you close enough that she could tear off and eat yours. On the other hand, she could have drowned him just now, and yet she hadn't.

Cautiously, Rick crawled to the edge of the water. The lady in the lake held out her arms, beckoning. Rick decided to go for broke; he waded out to her, until the water was up to his waist. She suddenly darted forward and caught Rick in a gentle embrace. Now that Rick was closer, he could see her even better in the moonlight. She truly was a lovely creature, more gorgeous than any woman Rick had ever laid eyes on. She held him softly, pressing against him, letting her scaly—tail?—coil under the surface of the water behind her. She was a Goddamn mermaid. Rick was standing in the lake being hugged a freaking mermaid. Then, of a sudden, she began to whisper some kind of song or spell. The tune was quiet and haunting, and Rick could feel the mermaid's warm breath on his cheek as she incanted the notes and unintelligible words. After that, she placed two kisses on Rick's face—one on his right eye, one on his left—before she let Rick go and slid back down under the water with a quiet splash.

A few seconds later, the mermaid's head once again appeared above the surface. "It's done. I've given you the second sight. Do not let them know that you possess the sight! If they know that you can see them, they will kill you."

"You still haven't explained—" stammered Rick. "I don't—who's them? What sight?"

"Go now!" whispered the mermaid. "The villagers return! Remember: you've seen nothing. Not me; not them." Then she slipped silently into the water and was gone.

Rick wasted no time. He thought that maybe he could see torchlight in the distance, coming his way down the lake's western shore. If what the mermaid had said was true, the villagers didn't really know for sure that he'd been out and about tonight. That meant that he still had a chance to discover the truth. He did his best to stay out of sight all the way back into town.

* * *

Rick had been careful last night to dry himself off and clean up all the mud that he might've tracked in. When he woke up that morning, everything was so peaceful and ordinary that it seemed like a different world. Perhaps last night had been nothing but a vivid dream after all? Rick could only hope. Because if everything had happened as he remembered it, that only meant that he was in it deep. Nearly everybody in the town was a member of some demon-worshipping cult, performing weird rituals in the middle of the night. And they had been trying to keep Rick from finding out. As he washed, shaved, and dressed that morning, Rick pondered hard, trying to fit all the pieces together in his head. The villagers were up to something no-good. The mermaid in the lake was attacking the villagers, maybe even killing them, but she'd saved his life. That meant that the mermaid was an ally—whereas the town was full of enemies.

Rick tried to remember everything he could about mermaids. There were too many myths and legends to count, from every culture all over the world, and they were nearly always vague or even contradictory. Mrs. Smith certainly hadn't made any mention of merfolk in the short time he'd been acquainted with her. Beyond that, Rick knew next to nothing for certain.

But she'd rescued him; saved his life. That was the detail that mattered.

* * *

Rick walked downstairs to the antique shop. "Hello? Mr. Lawson?" The place was empty. He poked around for a bit, peeked his head into all of the other rooms, but nobody was here. "Jen? Anybody home?"

It was silent. And in silence, Rick heard the delightful sound of opportunity.

He hurried over to the countertop near the front door and practically vaulted over to the other side. On Rick's first day in Two Bears Lake, Mr. Lawson had been very protective of the creepy little statuette sitting on the counter. As he thought back to the events of last night, Rick clearly remembered seeing a very similar idol on the altar near the bonfire. Maybe it was important. So Rick went searching for the lockbox. All too soon, though, he had to give into disappointment. The space behind the counter was empty. No statue, no lockbox, no nothing.

Rick sighed and stood up. He glanced around the shop again, making very sure that he was alone. Then he turned to the door behind the counter, the one that Rick had seen bookshelves through before. He tested the knob. It wasn't locked. Smiling in triumph, he opened the door and slipped inside.

The room beyond was small and cramped. There were indeed bookshelves lining the walls, but a cursory observation revealed that they were all perfectly normal sorts of books, exactly the kinds of volumes one would expect to find in an antique shop. There was also a desk in here; and sitting on the top of the desk were two brightly covered paperbacks. Something about those books caught Rick's eye. He moved over to the desk, picked them up, and nearly swallowed his tongue.

The books were titled firstly, _The Idiot's Guide to Things Man was Never Meant to Know_ , and secondly, _Necronomicon ex Mortis for Dummies_. Rick didn't know whether to laugh out loud or scream and break down weeping. This was just… staggeringly idiotic. Who in the hell even published books like this? A brief glance at the inside cover answered that. It read, "Yog-Sothoth Press. 666 Asmodeus Way: Hell." _Ask a stupid question,_ Rick thought bitterly.

At least the forces of evil had a wicked sense of humor.

* * *

Rick crossed the street and headed for Millie's Diner. He'd left the books in Mr. Lawson's office; it wasn't quite time yet to tip his hand. There was still plenty more that he needed to understand. The diner, he figured, was the best place to start the show.

The screen door was propped open, as usual, so Rick went right inside—and he froze right there in the doorway. In unison, everybody in the diner looked up and stared at Rick. Rick stared back, his blood curdling in his veins.

Creatures. Every last person sitting in the diner: they were all a bunch of hideous creatures, staring blankly at Rick like a pack of mindless zombies. Oh, they still looked kind of like the people that Rick had come to recognize, but each and every one of them sported some kind of grotesque, vaguely aquatic mutation. There was Millie, standing by the counter, her weight supported by a disgusting mass of writhing octopus-tentacles. If it weren't for the fact that her hair was also made of tentacles and her face was covered in cephalopod suckers, she would have looked a lot like the Sea Witch from _The Little Mermaid_. Sheriff Carlson sat in the corner, in his usual spot, dunking a doughnut in coffee. He was covered in chitinous pink plates, like a boiled lobster. Extraneous mandibles jutted out from both of his cheeks, and his left hand—the one holding the doughnut, not the coffee mug—was an oversized crustacean claw. There was no sign of Jen in the diner, but Mr. Lawson was here. He was covered in patches of black-green scales, with sharp-looking fins growing in odd places all over his body.

Millie waved a tentacle at Rick and said in a gulping, burbling voice, "Morning, hon. Something I can get'cha?"

Rick swallowed. So that was what the mermaid had meant by "second sight." And "them." Fighting to stay casual, he walked over to the counter, sat down on the stool, and said, "Coffee. P—pie. P-please."

"Coming right up, sugar." There was a sickening squelch as Millie slimed around behind the counter to serve up Rick's order. She set down some pie, poured the coffee, and looked intently at Rick. "Are you all right?"

Rick nodded quickly. "Yeah! Yeah. I, uh—I just—couldn't fall asleep last night. Heard some kind of, um, commotion outside. Any idea what that was?"

Millie shook her head. "Nope. No idea. Probably nothing, though. Just the quiet getting to you. I'll bet you city-slickers are ordinarily used to lots of noise."

"Ah… yeah, that's got to be it," said Rick. He ate quickly, drained his coffee, and threw some money onto the counter. Meanwhile, the rest of the diner patrons had gone back to ignoring him. Rick breathed a small sigh of relief. So far, so not-dead. He turned to face the booths by the window and said, "Mr. Lawson?"

John Lawson looked up at Rick, dead yellow eyes gazing through his spectacles. "Yes, Carter, what is it?" As he spoke, a weird-looking fin or gill or something flapped underneath his jaw and leaked what looked like mucous.

"Uh… um… I was just—looking for Jen. Do you… uh… know where she is?"

Lawson shook his head. "I can't say for sure. But I think she was supposed to help Jack clean the boathouse this morning."

"Okay… sure. Thanks." Rick suppressed a shiver and left the diner as quickly as his pretense of normalcy would allow.

* * *

It took willpower for Rick not to flee outright as he exited Millie's Diner. Once he was far enough away that he figured it wouldn't look suspicious, he picked up the pace and dashed over to Lawson's Antique Shop, where Gus's van was parked. Once there, he looked around to make sure that the coast was clear; then he surreptitiously retrieved the Agency-issued crystal ball that he'd stashed in the glove-compartment before departing Manhattan. It was a transparent orb about the size of a tennis-ball: you could hold it one hand easily enough, but it wasn't exactly convenient to carry around with you at all times.

Rick didn't use the crystal right away; instead, he slipped it into his pocket. As much as he wanted to touch base with Mrs. Smith, apprise her of his situation, and hopefully receive some help or some instructions, this wasn't the place to do it. The town of Two Bears Lake had eyes and ears. He needed to be somewhere truly private first. More than that, he was sorely tempted to simply hop in the van and take off, to get the hell out of Dodge right then and there. But he didn't do that either. The game had changed. The lady in the lake had Rick feeling curious again, and he wasn't going to leave until he figured out what her deal was.

With the crystal ball now safely in his possession, he jogged down the brick-paved street, leaving the town's buildings behind and following the curve down to the lakeside. He passed the cabins, turned along the western bank, and followed the trail up to Teeger's boathouse. It was a largish building made of weathered wooden planks, with a simple roof of corrugated tin and a long dock that ran out into the lake. Rick moved onto the dock, knocked on the boathouse door, and waited.

After a minute, Jack Teeger appeared. Rick swallowed down on the bile rising up in his throat. Now that he had "the sight," he was able to perceive the real Jack Teeger: a grotesque mutant of a man who seemed to be covered in barnacles and sea-urchin spikes. Teeger sized up Rick and asked, "Something I can do for you, detective?"

"I need to rent your boat again," said Rick, tamping down his fear. "Oh, and by the way, is Jen still here?"

"Naw, she finished up a while ago and went home," said Teeger. "By the by, boat rental's more expensive now."

Rick glared at the slimy creature before him. "In two days' time?"

"That was before I knew we had a monster in our lake. Liability's a bitch."

"…Fair point," conceded Rick. He agreed to Teeger's terms, and some minutes later, he was out on the lake again in the rusty little dinghy.

* * *

Rick piloted the boat out to the middle of Two Bears Lake. He was far enough away now that the town looked like a speck on the shoreline behind him. That meant, or so he hoped anyway, that it was safe to talk here. He cut the motor, rested his arms on the gunwale of the boat, and leaned out over the water. "Hey!" he called out. "Are you out here…? Uh… mermaid?"

Her head appeared on the surface almost at once. "My name is not 'mermaid.' It's Ayliannon." Her voice was just as hypnotically beautiful as her face, with a lilt that Rick still couldn't quite place—somewhere between Irish and Welsh, maybe—and now that it was broad daylight, he could tell that her skin and hair really were pale-gray and seaweed-green, respectively.

"Ayliannon?" repeated Rick. "That's… very pretty."

"I'm glad you think so," said the mermaid ambivalently. "Now, who are you? I could tell once I saw you that you weren't changed like the others. Where did you come from?"

"The name's Richard Carter; you can call me Rick. I work for something called the Faircourt Agency. Have you heard of it?"

The mermaid shook her head. "No. But then, we merrow-folk mostly keep to ourselves. We don't have many dealings with dry-landers."

"Well, it means that I'm here to help. Can you tell me what the hell is going on around here?"

Still treading water, the mermaid shrugged her shoulders. "I'm not sure exactly. But I do know that since before I got here, the people in the town were… tainted. Changed by some kind of dark power. The foul smell of it reaches me even now."

Rick was intrigued. "What do you mean, since before you got here?"

"I'll explain," said the mermaid, swimming up to the side of the boat. She gripped the gunwale and pulled herself halfway out of the water, but then the dinghy started to tilt in her direction. "Help me up?" she implored.

Rick took both of her arms in his hands and stood up, pulling Ayliannon into the boat with him. He fell backwards onto the floor of the dinghy, with the mermaid on top of him in a heap. The mermaid looked embarrassed and tried to apologize, but Rick suddenly found the situation unbearably funny. As she rolled away to let him up, Rick burst out laughing, and eventually Ayliannon joined him.

"Must be kind of awkward," chuckled Rick. "Fish out of water and all that jazz."

"Not ordinarily," said the mermaid. "But I'm not as strong as I could be at the moment. You'll have to forgive me. This freshwater doesn't really agree with my constitution. And the lake-fish… ick, so bland!"

Now that Ayliannon was inside the boat, Rick finally got a good look at all of her. From the waist up, she was indeed perfectly human and exquisitely lovely, just as folklore might describe. The only features above her waist that weren't quite normal were the unusual colors of her skin and hair, and the three delicate gill-slits that sat on either side of her neck, just above the shoulder. (These were closed up tight now that the mermaid was above the lake and breathing air.) That tail of hers, though, was downright spectacular to behold. It was at least seven feet long if it was an inch, not counting the tailfin that still flopped over the side of the boat and splashed at the water involuntarily. Her scales were a veritable rainbow of colors, silver down the "belly" of the tail and alternating stripes of pink and aqua along its sides and back. A long dorsal fin ran most of the way down her tail's spine. For whatever reason, it seemed to Rick more like the tail of a sea-serpent than that of a fish—like something you'd see out of an illustration on an old hand-drawn map.

Rick also noticed, turning a bit red when it finally occurred to him, that the mermaid was still completely naked. Ayliannon either didn't notice his embarrassment or was too polite to comment on it. In any event, Rick managed to get ahold of himself and grew suddenly serious. "So, let me get this straight," he asked. "You're from the ocean?"

Ayliannon nodded. "Yes. I've been trapped in this lake for more than a month now."

"But, how did you get here?"

"I'm not entirely sure. But I know that it was by magic. One day, I was exploring a trench in the seabed near my home, when—pow!—something struck me from behind. There was a funny sound, an odd green glow, and when I woke up… no salt. The water was fresh; I was in the lake."

"Wow," said Rick, sitting back to muse over her story. "So… are you in any danger here? From being in the lake, I mean? If you need saltwater to live—"

"Fresh, brackish, salt, even on dry land for a time, I can survive for as long as I must," said Ayliannon. "A merrow is not so easily destroyed! But we are elemental fae, and the sea is the source of our strength. If you can help me to get back to the ocean, Rick Carter, I should be very grateful."

"All right," said Rick with a nod of agreement. "I can definitely help you there. Huh; so I guess it's just a fairy-tale, then? Mermaids growing legs when they get dry?"

"I'm afraid so. Shape-changing magic is… difficult. Very dangerous, and often dark." To emphasize her point, Ayliannon waved a hand in the direction of the town. "As you've seen by now, I'm sure."

"Yeah. Exhibit A." Rick shuddered and then said, "Speaking of Creepshow City, population forty-one: have you really been knocking off the Village People from Hell, one hapless schmuck at a time?"

The mermaid shrugged and nodded, a turquoise blush coming to her cheeks. "I could think of no other way to stop them. They're doing something evil in those woods. I've heard their ritual every night, at midnight. They chant louder and longer, the closer it gets to the full moon." Here, the mermaid moved aside some of her hair, and now Rick could see an ugly green scab that scratched its way across the human skin on her side, right above her waistline. "One of them came armed. The bitch cut me. But it wasn't deep, and now she's drowned." There was a note of pride in her voice when she said that.

Rick looked over his shoulder, back towards the town. "Hm. Funny."

"What is it?" asked Ayliannon.

"Well, they're turning into sea-creatures. Fish-monsters. But you can still drown them."

"They're still changing, I think," said the mermaid. "Whatever they are, they're not Deep Ones yet."

"Deep Ones?" echoed Rick.

"Sea-devils," clarified Ayliannon. "Followers of Dagon—a hideous being from long ago, banished by the Fair Folk. Old legends say that he still sleeps, deep beneath the ocean floor."

"Hold the phone; that's got to be it," said Rick. "The mutant villagers, the weird ritual! They're trying to summon Dagon, or some Deep Ones, or something crazy like that. Using a copy of _Cthulhu for Morons_ and that creepy little stone statue of Mr. Lawson's…" Then he snapped his fingers and added, "Hey! I'll bet they already tried it during the last full moon, too; only they botched the spell and conjured you out of the ocean instead!"

"I… don't know if that's possible," said the mermaid, shaking her head. "Maybe…? It does kind of make sense."

But Rick wasn't really listening to her anymore. "I'll bet I'm right," he whispered to himself. "That's got to be it." Then he asked of Ayliannon, "We've definitely got to stop them, right?"

"Definitely," agreed the mermaid. "If they use dark magic to call something evil from the seas, it will devastate both my realm and yours."

"All right then," said Rick. "It's settled. Here's what I'm going to need you to do."

"Anything," said Ayliannon.

"Just be by the shore at midnight tonight, in the same spot you found me yesterday. Be ready to pull my bacon out of the fire again. So to speak."

"I don't know what that means, but I'll be there. It's the least I can do for almost killing you when we first met." The mermaid smiled sheepishly while Rick thought back to a few days ago, when she had indeed almost knocked him out of the dinghy and drowned him. He looked at the mermaid suspiciously, but she only shrugged and said, "Honest mistake. Until I saw you up close, I thought that you were one of them." As she spoke, the mermaid rolled and flopped over to the side of the boat and started pushing her bulky body up over the gunwale.

Rick stood up to help Ayliannon back into the water. "Well; save my ass a second time, and we'll forget that it ever happened. In fact, I'll even make it up to you by driving you back to the ocean myself." The mermaid slid into the lake with a tiny splash. Rick knelt down at the side of the boat, winked at the mermaid, and said, "That's a promise."

Ayliannon smiled and replied, "I'll hold you to it."

"Oh yeah!" said Rick. "You and me, Aylie, we're gonna do good things!"

"'Aylie'?" she repeated. "What is 'Aylie'?"

"It's your new nickname," said Rick. "Human tradition; very important. And 'Ayliannon' is just a little bit of a mouthful." As the mermaid swam away, he called out, "Now don't forget! Midnight!"

"I won't!" she called back. Then, she flipped her tailfin and disappeared under the water.

Rick sat alone in the boat for a minute, pondering, mulling over what he'd learned. Then he took the crystal ball out of his pocket. Now that he had the whole story, or as much of it as he was going glean from the mermaid at any rate, was time to talk to the boss-lady. There would be no more improvising or taking blind guesses in the dark for this analytically-minded engineer, no sir: it was time to make a plan.

* * *

In truth, Rick had already more or less decided on a course of action. He didn't think that he had the means to oppose the cultists directly; that would have required some firepower, or some high explosives, or something else equally violent that Rick didn't have access to at the moment. But then, that wasn't who Rick was: you could hardly call him a "roaring rampage" kind of guy. He'd done some Tae Kwan Do as a kid and some foil-fencing as an undergrad, and that was about the limit on his meager-to-nonexistent capabilities as a fighter.

He felt the weight of the crystal ball in his right hand; with his left, he shielded his eyes from the glare of the morning sun. Peering into the small object, he could only see reflections in its clear, glass-like surface. Then he squeezed it tightly and whispered the Elvish command-phrase that Mrs. Smith had taught him on the morning before he'd left the Faircourt Building: " _Méran quet mélamarta._ " At once, the transparent interior of the crystal filled with pinkish fog.

Several long minutes passed by before anything else happened. The gentle rocking of the dinghy on the lake-surface nearly lulled Rick into dozing off before the fog cleared and the pretty elfin face of Tamariel Smith appeared in the crystal. " _Apologies for the delay,_ " she said. Her voice was small and muffled. " _I was in a meeting. How can I help you, Richard?_ "

"Well, you were right about Two Bears Lake," said Rick. "There's definitely something freaky going on here."

" _What have you found?_ "

"Cultists." He paused a moment to let that word sink in. "Everybody who's anybody in this God-forsaken town is mutating into a Deep One and trying to summon Dagon. Apparently, it's all the rage this season."

Mrs. Smith gasped, and then her voice became like stone. " _Richard, I want you to listen to me very carefully: get out of there, right now. Come back to New York. I'll assemble a task-force to finish your assignment—_ "

Rick interrupted her. "How long's that gonna take?"

" _Perhaps, two days? I'll need to pull other agents off their cases—_ "

"Then we don't have time," said Rick. "Full moon's tonight. I'm all you've got up here; it's gotta be me."

" _Do you understand how dangerous this is!?_ "

"I think I've got some idea, yeah," said Rick.

Mrs. Smith gave Rick a searching stare before asking, " _What do you intend to do?_ "

Rick huffed a nervous sigh and said, "Just answer me this: do summoning rituals normally need some kind of, I don't know, component? Or an occult… something-or-other? A thing, to make them work?"

" _There's usually an arcane focus involved, yes,_ " answered Mrs. Smith. " _Why? Do you think that you've identified the focus?_ "

"I've got a hunch," said Rick. "So, if I get rid of the doodad, will that stop 'em for good?"

" _Most likely. But, Richard, if it's just you up against the entire town—_ "

"I know" said Rick. "But it isn't _just_ me. I've got at least one friend here, maybe more. Even still; it's gonna take some finesse." Before Mrs. Smith could reply, he leaned close to the crystal and whispered, " _Á telë._ " Abruptly, the interior of the crystal ball once again clouded over, and Mrs. Smith's image vanished from within it. _Huh,_ thought Rick to himself. _When Gus finally wakes up, he's gonna get a real kick out of speaking Elf, the big nerd._

Rick quickly pocketed the crystal and started up the dinghy's outboard motor. Then he aimed the till back towards the town and made for the docks outside of Jack Teeger's boathouse.

* * *

Thanks to his brief conference with Mrs. Smith, Rick was now pretty certain that he could throw a serious monkey-wrench into the cultists' plans. That statuette had to be the key. It was important enough to take center stage during their midnight ritual, and Mr. Lawson had it hidden somewhere under lock and key. Rick had handled the object briefly; he was admittedly no expert in antiquities, but the thing was definitely very old. An artifact like that might even be one-of-a-kind, which would make it irreplaceable. That was Rick's great hope, at any rate.

Once he got back to the town, Rick resolved to spend the rest of the day searching high and low for anything that might help—clues, tools, anything. More than once, one of the villagers confronted Rick about his snooping around, but he merely dissembled and said that he was scrounging for parts to help build a new gadget to search the lake with. That explanation seemed to satisfy the townsfolk: by now, they had come to regard Rick as a gadget-minded sort of detective.

Unhappily, Rick learned very little that afternoon—certainly nothing to change the plan that had been stewing in his mind since his conversation with Ayliannon that morning. When he finally returned to Lawson's Antiques in the evening, he found the place just as deserted as he'd left it. There was no sign of Mr. Lawson, and he realized that he hadn't seen hide or hair of Jen all day long. He gave the antique shop another once-over, tossing the place more thoroughly this time, but he still couldn't find any sign of the stone statuette. So, resigned to the course he'd chosen, he shuffled up the stairs and retired to his room to wait for the approach of midnight.

* * *

Rick sat on his bed with the window open, watching the full moon rise up into the sky. It was exceptionally bright out, even with a few wisps of cloud hanging in places. He looked down at his phone. 11:40 PM. In the distance, the chanting began, just as Rick had expected it would. _Well,_ he thought, _this is it._ It was now or never.

Resolutely, he marched down the stairs. The antique shop would be empty still; he was certain of that. He walked over to the far side of the shop. With a loud clatter, he threw aside the dressing-dummies and other small pieces of furniture that blocked his way over to the fireplace. He reached up to the display of arms hanging over the mantle and pulled down the shield with the crossed sabers. They were soldered together, but it didn't take much effort for Rick to pull them apart. In short order, he had managed to disassemble the decoration, tie a few straps to the shield, and select the better-looking of the two sabers. The weapon was old and rusted and kind of dull, but that wasn't really important.

Rick was a fairly muscular fellow. He'd kept in shape all his life, and he'd always been involved in one form of athletics or another. This saber was a whole lot heavier than the fencing foils he was used to, but Rick was still better than someone with absolutely no training at all. Sword and shield in hand, he headed out the door and into the woods.

* * *

Rick followed the chanting voices. It was getting close to midnight. He would have to act quickly now. He scurried underneath the pine boughs, taking every care not to make any more noise than he had to. He knew right where the clearing was now; and at any rate, one would have to have been blind and deaf not to see the bonfire and hear the chanting. He crept up to the edge of the clearing and peeked out.

Sure enough, the whole town was assembled here, swaying and circling and waving their arms around both the fire and the altar that bore the statuette. One figure near the altar seemed to be leading the chanting. The rest were dispersed around the clearing in a loose formation. Rick waited for a few seconds, eyeballing the distance between the edge of the clearing and the nearest robed villager. He would have to time this pretty flawlessly. He carefully set the shield and sword down on the ground, and he waited for one beat… two beats… three beats… then he pounced. He darted out from around a bush, grabbed the nearest of the hooded cultists around the mouth and neck, and dragged this unlucky individual back behind the trees. He held on fast while his victim struggled to breathe, but eventually Rick's grip won out, and the cultist slumped to the ground unconscious.

Rick speedily pulled off the cultist's robe and saw that the person he'd just choked out was someone altogether unknown to him—not that it mattered much at this point. He put the robe on himself, pulled the cowl down low over his face, and picked up the shield and saber again, careful to keep both items hidden underneath the black cloth. Then, slowly, he made his way out into the clearing and joined the others.

The chanting reached its climax, and all at once everybody let out a celebratory yell. Then the leader produced a stone bowl and started pouring red liquid—blood, Rick realized, though he had no clue as to where it had come from—on the ground before the altar. While the other cultists were fixed on this profane ritual, Rick nonchalantly pushed his way forward, getting ever closer to the center of the ring. The heat from the bonfire made his brow sweat. His heart was thudding hard in his chest. Rick feared that at any moment, someone in the crowd would recognize him, and then the jig would be up.

Then, amazingly, Rick found himself at the fore of the assembly. He was right in front of the altar, mere feet away from where the lead cultist—there was no mistaking Mr. Lawson at this distance—was just emptying the stone bowl and beginning another incantation. _Well,_ thought Rick, _here goes nothing. Time to screw the pooch and then get the hell out of Dodge._

Flinging the robe aside, Rick raised up the rusty saber. Gasps sounded throughout the crowd, and many of the cultists lifted up their hoods, including Mr. Lawson. Rick found himself standing in the middle of a fight-night gallery of horrors, creeps, and fish-faced mutants. Lawson looked right at Rick and said in a hoarse voice, "What in the hell do you think you're doing!?"

Now, Rick prided himself on being a man of wit; and he had had all day to come up with the _perfect_ one-liner for just this sort of occasion. But unfortunately, in that moment, Rick found himself totally overwhelmed and quite unable to come up with even the lamest of puns. So all he managed to say was, "Uh… breaking a rock in half with a sword." And on that note, he brought the saber down hard and shattered the lava-rock statuette of Dagon.

"You fool!" cried Lawson. "That idol was more than nine-thousand years old! You've ruined everything!" From beneath the folds of his cloak, he produced a dagger and advanced on Rick.

All of the other cultists starting pressing in close, bearing down on the lone untainted human in their midst. Rick swung hard with both the shield and the dull saber, bashing limbs and clobbering heads, but even still he felt hands and claws and tentacles all around him. These freaks were going to tear him limb from limb if he didn't get away soon! Out of the corner of his eye, Rick could also see that Sheriff Carlson was struggling to open his robe and get the revolver out of his holster (which was actually a pretty difficult prospect when you had a giant lobster claw where a hand with an opposable thumb used to be). To make some room for himself, Rick suddenly twirled the saber around in a 360-degree arc. Most of the villagers backed off, except for Donnie Carlson, who was finally getting a grip on his gun. Rick pulled back his arm and, with an effortful shout, heaved the shield as hard as he could, right at the sheriff. The lobster-man was struck full on the head; he fell backwards and collapsed in a heap on the ground.

"You know, I'd really love to stick around," said Rick, now holding the saber threateningly in two hands and backing towards the treeline. "…Only, I really wouldn't. So; bye." With that, he flung the saber into the crowd as well, little caring whether he actually injured someone or not, and then he turned around and fled as fast as he could go.

* * *

This was not like the methodical, dogged pursuit of the previous evening. This was a pack of feral beasts: injured, crippled, hell-bent on revenge. They tore and clawed and squelched their slimy way through the woods after Rick Carter, finally certain that they would soon be rid of the obnoxious interloper who had stuck his nose into their business for the last time.

As for Rick, he ran straight for the lake. Yes, to be sure, there was a pack of murderous devil-summoning weirdoes hot on his heels. But then again, Rick had an ace up his sleeve.

Earlier that day, he'd made friends with a mermaid.

As soon as he saw the lake through the trees, he doubled his effort and ran harder than he ever had before in his life. Then he was plunging into the water, wading and splashing in his attempt to get away. Soon, the lakebed disappeared beneath his feet, and Rick was swimming with all his might. Behind, he heard the splashes of the villagers coming into the water after him. But they didn't concern Rick; not anymore. Not when Ayliannon appeared before him.

"Hold tight," she whispered, taking the human into her arms. Then, to Rick's great astonishment, she pressed her lips tightly to his. Rick couldn't help himself; he melted into her and kissed back, even as she pulled him under the water and swam away at breakneck speed.

* * *

They surfaced together some distance away, past the town, on the lake's eastern bank. Rick came up out of the water and gasped for breath. Next to him, Ayliannon beached herself on the shore and said, "What was that?"

"What was what?"

"You kissed me!" said the mermaid.

"You kissed _me_!" Rick snapped back. "Not like I'm not flattered and everything, but I already have a fiancée!"

Aylie slugged Rick on the leg and said indignantly, "I was helping you breathe, you idiot!"

"My, my; isn't this romantic?" said a slurping, hissing voice coming from the lake behind them. "Do you want to kiss me too, lover-boy?" Rick and Aylie turned and saw a lone figure emerging from the lake. It was, by far, the most hideously deformed of all the mutants that Rick had so far observed. Covered from head to toe in scales and fins, it looked hardly human anymore.

Ragged gill-slits just beneath its ribcage opened and closed rhythmically. Dead, black fish-eyes and a grinning jaw filled with razor-sharp piranha teeth seemed to regard both man and mermaid as a predator looks at prey.

Rick gaped. "…Jen?"

Jen Lawson held up her clawed fingers and said, "Come here, cutie-pie. Just give us one little kiss."

"S-sorry," stammered Rick. "Like I was t-telling the lady: I'm spoken for."

In a flash, Aylie was in the water, grappling with Jen, trying to wrestle her down and pull her under. But it was apparent that Jen's changes were too far along: she could breathe under water. She couldn't be drowned. And in a straight-up fight, she and Aylie appeared to be evenly matched.

Rick scrambled along the shoreline, searching for an impromptu weapon. His hands fell upon a dead branch. Hefting this up, he waded out into the water… and waited. Then, with a splash, two heads appeared. Jen and Aylie were locked together, each with their hands around the other's neck. Jen's claws were digging into Aylie's skin, drawing aqua-colored blood. Rick wasted no time. He swung the tree-branch, hard, and clocked Jen Lawson right on the noggin. That gave Aylie all the advantage she needed to break Jen's grip and turn the tables: in an instant, she had the mutant villager in a death-grip. Then, with a twist and a sickening crack, Jen Lawson fell dead and floated face-down on the surface of the lake.

Rick struggled back onto the bank. Aylie crawled out of the water after him, her tail flopping ineffectually on the mud. "You have a vehicle?" she asked.

Rick nodded. "Yeah. Here, let me help you." He tried to hoist Aylie up into his arms, but it was no use; she was far too heavy for Rick to lift. There was just too much mass in that serpentine fishtail of hers. "I'm sorry," he breathed. "I don't think I can do this."

"Then don't try," said the mermaid. "I'm not _entirely_ useless on land. But I do still need your help."

Ayliannon leaned on Rick and let the rest of her weight fall onto her tail. She was more than strong enough to support herself; but without Rick there, she would only have been able to move by crawling along with her arms. As it stood, she was now able to put her arms around his shoulders, as if he were giving her a piggy-back ride; and while he walked, she half hopped and half slithered along. In this awkward manner, they made their way, slowly but surely, back to the town.

* * *

Luck was on their side. When they emerged from the treeline and turned onto the red-brick road, Rick and Aylie were relieved to discover that the town was still deserted. But it wouldn't last. Even now, the man and the mermaid could both hear the freakishly altered villagers scrabbling through the woods, searching for the one who had ruined all their plans.

Rick helped Aylie across the road. Then he pulled out his car-keys, unlocked the back of the van, and gently lifted her inside. "Comfortable?" he asked.

"Never mind that, just go!" said the mermaid. Her tailfin flopped angrily on the van's plastic-coated floor.

"All right, all right; keep your scales on," said Rick, who then dashed around to the driver's side door. He climbed into the van, pushed the key into the ignition, turned it, and… nothing.

"What's wrong?" asked Aylie from the rear of the vehicle.

"Um… hang on…" Rick tried the key again, but that obviously wasn't working. Then looked down, underneath the steering column, and swore under his breath. A tangle of wires, recently pulled, dangled from where the starter-motor was supposed to be connected. "We have a problem. They fucking sabotaged us."

Up ahead, Rick could see the villagers, many of them still wearing their black robes and hoods, emerging from the forest. They swarmed onto the street and ran straight for the van.

"Can you fix it?" asked the mermaid, barely concealed panic in her voice.

"Hope so," said Rick, reaching into the glove-box for his spare multi-tool. He started shaving the ends of the wires with a small blade, just as the villagers were now surrounding the van and pushing on it, rocking it from all sides.

"Hurry!" said Aylie.

"I'm hurrying!" retorted Rick. "Unless _you_ know how to hotwire a car!?" As he twisted wires together, claws and tentacles slapped against the windows. Then Rick gave a triumphant yell. "Yes!" The engine started. "So long, Creepshow City!" said Rick, throwing the vehicle into drive. He floored the gas and pushed through the throng of cultists. Some of them were flung from the van; some might have even been run over. Rick honestly didn't care. He just peeled out of Two Bears Lake, burning rubber all the way, and he didn't look back.

* * *

The van bounced down the dirt road. It was kind of hard to see underneath the dense canopy of pines, but Rick wasn't in the mood to slow down. Aylie awkwardly crawled from the back of the van partway into the front, where she could sit herself up more comfortably in the passenger seat next to her rescuer. "You've saved my life," said the mermaid earnestly.

"Call us even, then," said Rick. He glanced over at Aylie and remembered yet again that she was still naked as a jaybird. Tilting his head toward the back of the van, he asked, "You see that bag back there?" When the mermaid nodded yes, Rick continued, "You might want to throw on one of my shirts. Just in case we get stopped on the road. We can't have you flashing your chest at some random highway cop. Although, it might just get us out of a ticket, now that I think about it."

Many human customs still escaped Ayliannon's understanding—including whatever Rick was talking about now concerning "cops" and "tickets"—but she did recognize that humans made a big deal about covering themselves with clothes. She was just about to ask him to explain what a ticket was, when she spotted something in the road ahead of them. It looked like a man, stepping out to block the van's passage. "Rick!" she shouted, pointing past the windshield.

"I see him!" said Rick, who tried his best to swerve around. Outside, the van was just passing the old bait shop and gas station. The attendant, the first man that Rick had met in Two Bears, was standing in the road, as if he could stop a speeding vehicle. Granted, he didn't look very much like a man anymore—he seemed more like a blob of goo and sea-grass now—and next to him, his mutant bloodhound crawled across the street on two paws and the rear body of a sea-slug. Rick tried to swerve; but a van wasn't really made for hairpin maneuvers. With a stomach-churning splat, both the slime-man and the slug-dog were creamed across the road.

Rick turned to Aylie, who was still frozen in shock and disgust, and he tried to lighten the mood. "Looks like they're gonna have to change the sign again. Two Bears Lake: population thirty-nine, minus one dog."

* * *

Rick handed the little crystal ball to Aylie, who replaced it in the glove compartment. After having driven straight on through the night, it was now nearly dawn, and New York City was close. Rick had just finished updating Mrs. Smith—who, it seemed, didn't mind the early hour at all—and now he pulled off the freeway and aimed the van for the Agency headquarters.

Ayliannon sat in the passenger's seat, now wearing a white button-up shirt that didn't fit her at all well. More than once, she'd seen Rick nearly nod off at the wheel. Jokingly, she offered, "Do you want me to drive the rest of the way?"

Rick, bleary-eyed and barely holding it together, looked over at the mermaid. He glanced down at her coiling fishtail (which was long enough that it still stretched between them and into the van's rear compartment) and then up at her smiling face, and he finally caught onto the joke. "Uh… maybe next time," he chuckled.

A while later, the van finally pulled off of Fifth Avenue and into the glamour-obscured parking garage beneath the Faircourt Building. Ahead, Rick could see that Mrs. Smith and Hans the gnome were already on the garage floor, waiting for him. They were standing together in front of a shut wooden door set into the garage's concrete wall. Hans was awkwardly carrying a pair of human-sized crutches.

Rick pulled the van to a stop and got out. Moving over to the passenger's side, he opened the door for Ayliannon and helped her down. Once again, she leaned on Rick, who helped her to stand up on her tail. At this point, Hans came forward with the crutches.

"Miss," he said, handing them to the mermaid.

"Huh," said Rick. "Wonder why I never thought of that."

Ayliannon took the crutches, propped herself up, and tried a few experimental steps. "Interesting," she said. They actually worked rather well.

"Miss Ayliannon," said Mrs. Smith, indicating the door, "I believe you've been kept from your home for quite long enough. If I may…" She opened it up, revealing it to be one of her enchanted dimensional doors. Beyond lay a rocky stretch of North Atlantic shoreline with the ocean visible not too far away. Waves crashed on the beach, and seagulls squawked overhead. The still-rising sun painted the sky over the ocean the color of coral.

Tears of joy came to the mermaid's eyes. She turned to Rick and said, "Well. I guess this is goodbye."

"Guess so," Rick nodded. "It's a shame. It was… nice to meet you."

The mermaid smiled and gingerly wiped her eyes. "Likewise," she said with a nod. Then she looked down and noticed that she was still wearing Rick's shirt. "I won't need this anymore. I'm sure you must want it back." She reached to unbutton it, but Rick stopped her.

"Keep it," said Rick. "Who knows? You might decide to come visit someday."

"Goodbye, Rick Carter," said Aylie. She leaned close and kissed him on the cheek. "If we don't see each other again, I want you to know, I'm very grateful."

"So long, Aylie."

"This way, Miss," said Hans. The mermaid turned and, using the crutches, followed after the gnome. Hans escorted her through the magical door, and they both headed down towards the ocean.

"Fascinating," said Mrs. Smith.

Rick looked over at the elf. "What is?

"Oh, nothing. It's just that halflings aren't usually so… _friendly_ towards people they barely know."

"Halflings?" repeated Rick.

Mrs. Smith's voice then took on a lecturing quality, as if she were reading from an encyclopedia. "Halflings are hybrid beings, magical like fae but mortal like humans. They're often a chimerical blend of human and animal: merfolk, centaurs, satyrs. And they don't make friends easily; or, at least, not with True Fae."

As she spoke, Mrs. Smith turned back towards the elevator. Rick wanted to stay near the dimensional door and watch Ayliannon return to the ocean, but now he had to chase after Mrs. Smith to carry on the conversation. "Why should that be?" he asked. "Aylie seemed friendly enough."

"Well, I'm sorry to say, halflings aren't given much standing in the Fair Realm. Amongst the elves, the sidhe, and the other High Fae, there exists something of a prejudice against them."

"Is that because they're mortal, or because they're part animal?" asked Rick.

"A little of both, I should imagine," confessed Mrs. Smith. She sighed. "But then, nobody ever said that the Fair Folk were perfect." She pulled the lever on the elevator floor, activating the mechanism that would take them both back up into the building proper. "And on that note, Richard, I must say, the events of this past week have filled me with considerable self-doubt! You succeeded—and admirably, I might add—but you were _forced_ into those circumstances. I sent you, untrained, into a situation of unanticipated peril. Truth be told, I'm seriously questioning my own competence right now."

Rick didn't respond. It was something of a staggering admission, coming from an elvish wizardess who seemed so cool and collected all of the time. Nearly a minute went by in silence, while the elevator ascended past uncounted floors. Then Rick said, "Maybe… I could do with some training."

"Maybe you could," said Mrs. Smith with a small smile. "But I hear you can handle yourself with a blade."

"A fencing foil, maybe," said Rick with a roll of his eyes. "But it's a place to start."

"Indeed," agreed Mrs. Smith.

The elevator came to a halt, and Rick followed the elf woman as she led him to her office. Once there, she moved to sit behind her desk and said, "You've done exceptionally well, all things considered. I've already begun to assemble a cleanup-crew, which I'll dispatch to Two Bears Lake with all possible haste. They should have the aftermath of that little debacle taken care of shortly."

"Good to know," said Rick, taking a seat opposite Mrs. Smith. "Just out of curiosity what'll happen to the townsfolk?"

"That's a rather complicated question," said Mrs. Smith, leaning back in her chair. "Disenchantment, if it proves feasible, and the villagers cooperate. Otherwise, they'll have to be incarcerated for a time; possibly banished to another plane of existence more suited to their new physiology."

"Seems harsh," said Rick.

"Perhaps," said Mrs. Smith. "But, considering what they were trying to do…" She shook her head as her voice trailed off. "In any event, they cannot remain in New York so long as they're still… _transformed_."

"You're the boss, I guess," said Rick. But he still didn't like the implications of what Mrs. Smith was saying.

"In the meanwhile, I believe that I shall have to devise a training regimen geared to an operative with your particular set of talents. Complete the course, and I'll promote you to full agent."

Rick glanced out through the large window in Mrs. Smith's office. Outside, the morning sun was dimmed by a layer of light-gray clouds. It was going to rain today. "I have some more questions. About this job—about what I can tell people."

"Of course," said Mrs. Smith. "We can discuss those parameters at length another time. But first, I thought you might like to see how Augustus is doing, now that he's up and about."

Rick perked up immediately. "Gus is better!?"

"He's not quite yet back at a hundred percent," Mrs. Smith admitted. She coughed and said, "There's still some lingering narcolepsy. But he is awake most of the time now, and quite lucid. You'll most likely find him recovering in suite 737."

Rick was surprised. "That's—right across the hall from the rooms you gave me."

"I thought it would be appropriate," said Mrs. Smith.

"Sure is," said Rick. He pointed at the door and said, "You mind if I—?"

Mrs. Smith giggled and dismissed him with a wave of her hand. "Of course not. Off you go, now."

Quick as you please, Rick was headed for the exit. He paused at the door just long enough to say, "Thanks, Mrs.—I mean, Tamariel. I really mean it."


End file.
